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Cliques. Gossip. Back-stabbers. Best friends.
The sweeping perception of the schoolhouse bullying epidemic launched into a full-scale revision upon Dr. Nicki Crick’s arguably tardy coining. Through “Today Show” appearances and “Oprah” talkbacks, the nation observed as Crick asserted the hot-button behavioral truth of today’s children: bullies do not only assume the form of the stock creature who gave you noogies until you coughed up your lunch money. Rather, bullies may be the friends who won’t allow you to sit at the coveted lunch table, the girl who rolls her eyes when you raise your hand in gym class, or even your best friend. But any self-assured 9 year old could have told you that.
This perspicacity is the crux of the recently launched, wholly original, and altogether zestful production of “The Hundred Dresses” at the Chicago Children’s Theatre. The zippy 80-minute piece, a deft refashioning of Eleanor Estes’ 1944 Newberry Honor book of the same name, explores with great fancifulness the sculpting pain of isolation, the ache of peer pressure, and the redemptive power of a child’s imagination. Ultimately the text exfoliates the plights of each the bully, the bullied, and the bystander.
Set in post-World War II U.S. suburb, (although the relevant historical context is often blurred in G. Riley Mills’ text), “The Hundred Dresses” weaves the often harrowing narrative of Wanda Petronski (the percipient Lauren Patten), a Polish immigrant who arrives in North America with her widowed father following a tumultuous journey across seas. Donned with a faded, threadbare frock and an impenetrable accent, Wanda is ripe for the picking when it comes to the five Franklin Elementary schoolers who are all-too-ready for the pounce. Breathlessly striving to integrate into the social hierarchy that is the playground, the economically-drained Wanda alleges to own one hundred dresses. They are garments that, although bristling with life on Wanda’s water-colored pages, exist as a mere representation of such tangible feasts.
[caption id="attachment_1797" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow"]
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Peggy Hawthorne (an astutely insidious Natalie Berg) promptly inaugurates a battle of relational aggression against the unknowing Wanda, inviting her billeting peers to partake in the scouring fanfare. Armed with slithering quips and acidic silences, Peggy’s followers succeed in Wanda’s ostracism, a course that is ultimately dismembering.
The dramaturgic arc of the piece rightly focuses on the Peggy’s well-meaning social proselyte, Maddie Martin (the superbly layered Leslie Ann Shepard, equipped with a velvet-fringed legato). Maddie aids the escalating classroom war as the audience’s personal window of conscience. Maddie’s is a narrative voice that, while tentative, comes to understand that the consequences of inertia can sometimes outweigh those of action. Skipping along Kevin Depinet’s polyvocal set, Maddie engages in the sort of philosophical musings that often plague those of a prepubescent age. “Will the other girls pick on me instead?” Maddie bemoans at examination of her eighth-life crisis. If there are two types of people in the world as Estes’ suggests, those who know what to do and those brave enough to actually do it, which one could an 8 year old hope to be? It is the essential query that limns both Mills’ lyrical text and Ralph Covert’s luminous score.
[caption id="attachment_1798" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow"]
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The playfully irreverent Sean Graney imbues his production with a sense of the dichotomous psyche that has long plagued our young denizens. Riffing the balance between unquenchable giddiness and piercing sorrow, Graney’s direction reflects the vacillating world of the elementary school setting. Estes’ publication receives a precocious musicalization by Ralph Covert (of “Ralph’s World” fame). The score eschews the typical Disney bubblegum for rascally pop and surging ballads. “Passing of Autumn” and “Wanda Petronski is Missing” serve as the score’s most memorable anthemic hymns.
In its most prodigiously spirited work to date, the Chicago Children’s Theatre has espoused a timely dialogue for its ripe viewers. Though consummately frolicsome, “The Hundred Dresses” aptly defies the jocular tale too often found in children’s ensembles. The production unapologetically propels its instructional thesis in all aspects of its compendium telling. And like Maddie, audience members will walk away from the experience with a crucial insight: sometimes doing nothing is the worst betrayal of all.
“The Hundred Dresses” plays through November 22, 2009 at the Royal George Theatre Mainstage, 1641 N. Halsted St. For tickets and more information please visit www.ChicagoChildrensTheatre.org.
