"Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that."
-Russell T Davies
After a successful but typical experience directing tech for a high school production of the lighthearted musical, Anything Goes, earlier this year I was contracted to a task I hadn’t touched since college. As a dramaturge, I was asked to produce an environment (props/sound/art) for the same school’s Spring drama production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1954 play, The Bad Seed. I had not heard of the play before and not read or seen it. As I picked up the unremarkable, gray-covered script and began leafing, the play quickly made itself known as a murder mystery—and for Broadway in the mid-1950s, a dark one at that. As I flipped page after page through its two acts and eight scenes, all set in the same living room of an apartment home in the Deep South, The Bad Seed distinguished itself summarily from mere entertainment to something of artistic value. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Anything Goes anymore.
The play has a run-time of about 2 hours and 15 minutes, similar to a typical 2019 Hollywood blockbuster, but this is pretty much the only feature The Bad Seed shares with something like The Avengers. The show is 99% dialogue, it all takes place in one room, and the majority of the prop, set, and sound pieces the viewer sees are there to give the actors something believable to do with their hands. SPOILER ALERT: three characters die and the discussion of at least four other deaths come up, but we don’t see a single one of them. While this may sound dry as yesterday’s toast to a modern viewer, I can assure you it isn’t. If you have the ability to partake in two hours of fascinating discussion over sweet tea, gin and tonics, and the occasional peanut butter sandwich, you’re in for a ride that will entertain you, challenge you, and potentially frighten you a little about the state of the world we all live in.
What is The Bad Seed?
The Bad Seed plays out the fictional story of a mother and daughter. The daughter, Rhoda, appears to be an absolute angel at first, receiving perfect marks in school and in deportment (which honestly, I had to look up). She is praised by all, though her mother, Christine, senses a certain strangeness about her daughter. The play gives us a window into multiple conversations between Christine and others in her circle of friends, who ultimately represent different echelons of her society: a pop psychologist, a psychiatrist, a celebrated police detective, a school teacher, and the groundskeeper of the apartment home she and her husband rent. Considering who Christine is, these conversations are believable. They could and did really happen in homes in the 1950s when psychology and its attempts to unravel the criminal mind were living room topics of the day. The effects of suburbanization and white flight had not yet fully relegated classes to separate neighborhoods. A snapshot is provided into a world that has been too often warped in our collective consciousness by both the rose-colored lenses of nostalgia and dramatized representations like AMC’s “Mad Men.”
As these dialogues develop and build upon each other, we learn that the psychologists and scientists of the day are beginning to support the idea of a “bad seed”—the fact that a propensity to heartless and criminal behavior may be genetic, and not learned—a controversial topic then as it is now. At the same time, we are learning that Rhoda was somehow involved in the death of one of her peers in primary school. She at first shows no emotional reaction to the news of the boy’s death, then denies involvement, then denies a motive, then shows no remorse for the act that it becomes clear she has committed. At the moment of this reveal the play slams the viewer with questions: how did she learn this? From who? Is it possible that she is just a “bad seed?” Can a bad seed be changed? Can we stop her from killing again? All of a sudden, through no direct statement from the play, the audience subtly realizes that if Rhoda is indeed a “bad seed” then she may need to be stopped somehow, permanently, or else she will be an echo of criminals before her, who in the face of every support, aid, and second chance, continued to cause pain and death until their own death.
Without spoiling any more for you, the play leaves the audience very uneasy, with the sound of a child slowly plinking on a piano, and a brain full of knotted questions.
Theater touches on the basic human need to mimic. We love to replay what we have seen others do—we do it purposely and we do it subliminally, even when we don’t want to. From infancy, through mimicking others and watching others mimic others, we learn how to talk and walk, what to think, and what we should and should not do. Theater bundles the natural occurrence of this human behavior into a 2 hour and 15 minute package. This is why it has endured since ancient times, and why once people get involved they find it so hard to break away. Have you ever been engrossed in a play or a movie and when the lights come up and the credits roll you feel like you just had a personal experience—lived a whole other life in the span of that drama? That’s because, in your mind, you almost did. You just learned, considered, and felt a whole darn lot.
A well-written play like The Bad Seed deals with the breadth of human experience. Without leaving a one-room set, it deals with some of the biggest questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be family, what it means to raise a child, what justice means, and whether it’s God’s, the State’s, or your responsibility to dispense that justice. Unlike so much of what we consume, it is not cliche or easily wrapped up by the time the credits roll. Good drama is hard. This doesn’t mean it has to be frightening, sad, or dark, but it does need to make you experience something besides distraction—something in your head, heart, and soul. You might enjoy watching a really snappy light-hearted comedy, or a really wholesome love story, but are those your favorite stories? I am a huge fan of the TV show Futurama, and I love love love Jurassic Park, but when someone asks me what my favorite movie is—if I could only watch one movie for the rest of my life—I still find my honest answer to be It’s a Wonderful Life.
Really great drama strikes a balance: it is hard and it is entertaining—and because of that, you want to get on that roller coaster again. It allows us to look at the great questions of humanity in a safe space—somewhere where the answer we come to won’t actually have lasting consequences. We can play out situations that would be absolutely scarring in real life, but then we get to go home and decide what we would do if we were posed with them in reality. We get to fall in love, duel our brother, convict a criminal, set them free, and then go home and have dinner. Drama is a place where we can ask whether or not God is sovereign over history without getting disinvited from Thanksgiving. It is a field where we can challenge ourselves and others in a beautiful way. Given some alternatives, I promise that developing oneself as a person is preferable when done from the comfort of a plush red seat. So artists and lovers of art, go see a play, go bookmark the good stuff on Prime Video, and never hesitate to use the stage as a place to trial run the big questions—before you know it, you might even have a classic on your hands.
(Editor's note: This is the first in a series of essays on theater. Over the next few months, we will be exploring this art form through the lens of both contemporary and classic plays.)
Forefront is committed to fostering a robust conversation on the intersection of Christian faith and the arts by publishing a wide range of voices and opinions. The views expressed here reflect those of the author.
About the Author
Share this Post