How does a bad seed grow?

First, a disclaimer. I’m about to do something that I’ve never done before in this column and promise not to do again if I can help it. I’m going to talk about the play that my advanced acting class at CCHS will be performing this weekend. Not to worry — I’m too tired to recount the endless hours of rehearsal, frustrations, funny moments, small triumphs, scenes gone right, tech gone wrong, and all the rest that my dead brain can’t recall at the moment. No, this is about William March’s idea, Maxwell Anderson’s dramatization, and the 1956 film.

March didn’t live to see the success of his best selling novel “The Bad Seed” published in 1954 and nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Nor did he see its long-running success as a Broadway play, or its incarnation as an Academy Award nominated movie directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Patty McCormick. He did, however, hit a nerve and open a conversation that continues to this day.

Are killers born or made? Nature or nurture? How do you recognize a Ted Bundy before it’s too late — or is it too late by the time you recognize one? In “Bad Seed,” March spins his story on the side of nature. Little Rhoda Penmark, so perfect in so many ways - too perfect, some might say - has a mean streak that frightens other children and rouses the suspicions of her own loving mother. Christine Penmark has demons of her own, but the worst is the fear of what she may have unwittingly produced.

Rhoda herself is like one of those strange plants that nature designed in a moment of wicked genius: attractive, brutally selfish, alluring to its victims, and deadly. She was born that way. She has no conscience. What she does have is a razor-edged intelligence that perceives what adults want to see and hear, knows how to deliver it, and how to adroitly sidestep responsibility for her crimes. Christine must face the fact that she will never change.

It is interesting not only how March dealt with the problem in his novel and subsequently in the play, but the critical change that occurred when Hollywood took over and the Hays office was involved. Some readers will remember that from 1930 to about 1964, American movies were subjected to the “Hays Code” which prescribed what could be shown or not shown, said or not said, suggested, ridiculed, or removed. Not being considered “art,” so the theory went, the First Amendment did not apply. Married couples had separate beds. Homosexuals did not exist. And crime never paid.

This is the crux of the difference between what March created and what Hollywood demanded. According to March’s theory, sometimes evil does win. Sometimes the bad guys do get away with it. Sometimes life isn’t perfect. Hollywood — and the very name is synonymous with a forced unreality - insisted that crime must never pay. The bad guy must never succeed. The only endings worth having are happy ones. And so those who know the play but also know the movie will know what I’m talking about. In one, against all possible reality given the circumstances, our natural human desire to see a “right” outcome prevails. In the other, we are faced with a much more shocking yet believable conclusion.

Which one do we want? The answer to that one is more personal. Some people have enough grim reality in their ordinary lives and seek out the fantasy and the happy ending for sheer escape. Others, perhaps more suspicious of manipulation, demand an answer that sounds like the truth, something that the tired cynic might define as “the thing you don’t want to hear.”

Which one are you? And were you born that way or did you become that way?

Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She teaches drama at CCHS.

Want to go?
What: “Bad Seed”
Where: CCHS
When:  May 8 and May 9, 7 p.m. both shows
Admission: $5 adults, $3 students