Skillful acting and directing help smooth over the dramaturgical fault-lines in The Children, a nuclear disaster play now in its L.A. premiere at the Fountain.
First produced in London in 2017 and then a year later in New York, the work by British playwright Lucy Kirkwood transposes the Fukushima, Japan debacle to the east coast of England and asks us to get involved in the lives of three of its survivors. All of them worked at the plant and believed in the wonders of nuclear energy, only to later suffer from its radioactive fallout, not just physically but spiritually.
Hazel (Lily Knight) and Robin (Ron Bottitta) are retired nuclear scientists living in a primitive cottage after having abandoned their nearby farm house when the tsunami struck. Kirkwood would have us believe these two stricken, savvy scientists would hang on in an irradiated zone -- “you can practically see the radiation in the air,” Hazel admits — because they feel responsible for the doomed livestock they left behind.
Enter Rose (Elizabeth Elias Huffman), a garrulous, excitable physicist. Though she, too, was poisoned by radiation when the reactor leaked — she’s had a mastectomy, we soon learn — she has wisely fled the disaster zone. She stayed away for nearly thirty years, only to suddenly turn up in her friends’ household and cause much upset. At first it seems all she wants is to rekindle the affair she’d once had with Robin, but no, she has a different, deeper ulterior motive. Out of guilt for having played a role in the nuclear blast, she wants to expiate that guilt by returning to the still-leaking power station and restoring it to full strength. Not only that, she wants Robin and Hazel to join her team. It’s the moral thing to do, she insists.
When her friends point out that the radiation will surely kill them, Rose counters by saying it won’t happen for twenty years. “You’ll be dead anyway by then,” she points out. “That’s why I’m not recruiting anyone under the age of 65.”
Things like that had me cringing in my seat, only to be pulled back into the narrative flow by the valiant work of the actors as they made their characters come alive in a believable and oft-thrilling way.
The Children is an apocalyptic tale about a trio of scientists trying to cope with their professional and personal flaws and failures.
