Theater Review—

‘Bad Seed’ Frighteningly Good

By Julie Stern

SHERMAN — In the 1950s, when Mervyn LeRoy made a hit film out of Maxwell Anderson’s hit play The Bad Seed (which was in turn based on William March’s best selling novel) the moralistic Hays Code decreed that in the movies, it must be shown that crime does not pay. Therefore, while the rest of the picture stayed close to the original sources, the ending was tweaked in a most suspicious fashion.

However it is the play (which made a household term out of the concept of “the bad seed”) that can be seen through May 14 at The Sherman Playhouse. Like Sleuth, Death Trap and Gaslight, The Bad Seed is a well crafted classic thriller. If it is performed less frequently by local theater groups, it is because unlike those others, it requires a child actor to be the center of the story, and it is often hard to find one good enough to be convincing.

Happily, director Jane Farnol has found just the ticket in Campbell Coughlin, who plays eight-year old Rhoda Penmark, the charmingly manipulative psychopath who kills people to get what she wants. All the other characters then fall into place around her.

When Captain Kenneth Penmark goes to the Pentagon on military duty in the opening scene, he leaves behind his loving wife Christine, and their daughter Rhoda, a high-achieving paragon of neatness and academic success. What he doesn’t know, but what Christine reluctantly begins to suspect, is that there is something odd about their little girl. When she is passed over for the penmanship medal at school, Claude Daigle, the little boy who did win it, drowns under mysterious circumstances at the school picnic. And the medal, which his mother had pinned to his shirt that morning, is somehow missing…

Christine, a warm and gentle woman, is haunted by troubling dreams and snatches of forgotten memories. Could she have been adopted as a very young child?

Monica Breedlove, her best friend and landlady, considers Rhoda to be a wonderful kid, and showers her with attention and little gifts. Rhoda loves Monica…

But Leroy, the sneaky and slightly sinister handyman, recognizes dark shadows beneath the smiling surface, and begins to put two and two together. Leroy will have to be dealt with…

Along with the job done by Miss Coughlin, Ms Farnol has gotten some excellent performances from a number of other actors, especially Adam Battelstein as Leroy,  Katherine Almquist as Monica Breedlove, and Beth Bonnabeau as Claude Daigle’s mother, Hortense.

Vicki J. Sosbe shows a lot of pain and anguish as Christine, slowly becoming aware of the horror of the situation. She could have conveyed a more sunny disposition earlier on, the point being that even though she has carried and transmitted the “bad seed,” she herself is in no way tainted by it. She is a genuinely warm and loving person, however, the psychopathic tendency having skipped a generation.

Joshua Kragh as Captain Penmark, Martin Rosato as Monica’s bachelor brother, Susan Abrams as Rhoda’s nervous teacher Miss Fern, Peter Pecora as a criminal psychologist, David Almquist as Mr Daigle, and Patrick Spaulding as Christine’s journalist father all have smaller parts which they handle very well.

The Bad Seed is an entertainment. Though it purports to tackle the question of whether psychopathology is inborn, and can be passed on genetically, its real purpose is to give audiences the thrill of watching the smirk on the face of the little monster as she charts her selfish course through life — and gets away with it.

(Performances are Friday and Saturday evenings at 8, and Sunday afternoon at 2. Tickets are $20.

Call 860-354-3622 or visit TheShermanPlayhouse.org for reservations and additional information.)