ANACORTES — The lies start small.

“I am sorry, Mrs. Mortar. I went to get these flowers. I thought you would like them and I didn’t know it would take so long to pick them,” Mary, who is late for class, tells her teacher in the dramatic play “The Children’s Hour,” which runs June 5-27 at the Anacortes Community Theatre.

Truthfully, the flowers came from the trash, and soon Mary’s lies escalate.

After she runs away from boarding school, she’s confronted by her grandmother and deflects the blame with another lie — her teachers Karen and Martha are in a lesbian relationship.

Mary’s accusation isn’t true but that doesn’t soften the lie’s impact, said Jan Trumble, director and president of the theater’s board.

“It ruins these people’s lives. It touches every single person’s life in the show,” Trumble said.

The Lillian Hellman play was first staged on Broadway in 1934 and performed again in a 1952 revival.

Trumble doesn’t worry that the play’s alleged lesbian relationship doesn’t have the same controversial zing that it did in 1809, when the real-life incident on which the play is based happened, or even the 1930s or ’50s (the Anacortes production is set in the ’50s). The play still has plenty of relevance today, she said.

“This is not a play about two homosexuals. This is a play about a lie,” she said.

Trumble read the play for the first time as a high school freshman.

“I saw the movie,” she said of the 1961 film version starring Audrey Hepburn as Karen and Shirley MacLaine as Martha. “And I happened to pick Lillian Hellman to do a report. I was 14 then, and it touched me.”

Trumble saw pieces of her classmates in Hellman’s gossiping cast of girls.

“At least once in everyone’s life they are at least inadvertently involved in some form of gossip,” said Rebecca Launius, who plays Karen.

“The theme throughout the play is something that everyone has been on both ends of the coin,” Launius said. “… A lot of times I don’t think some people can see the effect that something they say might have on someone else’s life.”

For instance, Karen starts off as a happy person who is self-employed, with a career of her own and the love of her life, Launius said of her character, who co-owns the school and is engaged.

“She is not prepared for that kind of behavior, especially from one of her students,” Launius said.

After planning for years to stage the “The Children’s Hour,” Trumble ordered the script five years ago and began selecting actresses she knew to play the characters. But it took her a while to convince the theater’s board to stage the play, which has a harder edge than the theater’s usual repertoire. By the time Trumble was able to begin rehearsing, her original cast had outgrown their roles.

Tasha Weiss, 13, will play Mary. Weiss is not naturally manipulative, but Trumble said she pushes her to be ruthless.

n Elliott Wilson can be reached at 360-416-2147 or at .