It’s 9 p.m. on a Monday night and the cast members of Ensemble Theatre’s The Children’s Hour all have a sticky-looking sheen on their faces. The heat wave has turned their West Side private-school rehearsal space into a room better suited to hot yoga.

Instead, the actors are digging into the third and final act of Lillian Hellman’s ambitious 1934 debut, in which a young girl tells a lie about her teachers—best friends Karen and Martha—whose lives ultimately unravel at the accusation that they are lovers. The play is rich with brilliant observations and every brittle line burns with multiple meanings, a series of soft poems and angry tongue-lashings.

“When I first read it, I thought, ‘It seems so formal and a little starchy, because of the period,’ but when working it, the starchiness allowed so much emotion,” director Alison Raine says, taking a seat outside the sweltering gym after rehearsal wraps.

She’s been in love with the play since she workshopped a monologue in an acting class years ago. “You’re repressing so much and you’re trying to be decent and moral, and that’s a really interesting challenge as an actor. I began to see how clever Lillian Hellman was.”

Raine sees The Children’s Hour as something of a mirror for modern society—a feminist, thought-provoking work that tackles morality, hypocrisy, homophobia, and love in all its ugly or tender vulnerability.

“Homosexuality and the LGBTQ movement, acceptance and compassion: that’s still heartbreakingly relevant,” Raine says. “Also, women’s roles and how far they’ve shifted and how far they’ve yet to shift: we take two steps forward and then take one step back. It’s interesting to me exploring the start of the feminist movement. I’m a New Zealander and we were the first people to give women the vote! It’s a play looking at how far we’ve come and how much more work there is to do.”

The Children’s Hour is by a woman, about women, and in this case directed by a woman. Raine, who asked to helm the production, says she’s incredibly frustrated about the gender gap visible in “the number of women working in theatre and working in the arts. Even in orchestras and film—it’s just so disparate to the number of women in the population even, it’s ridiculous.”

Raine, who is also an actor and the education manager at Ensemble Theatre, compares the architecture of film crews and theatre companies to that of the military. “It’s parts of a unit coming together. The protocol is set up that way, so I think that’s also part of the dynamic: ‘Oh, women can’t do it, a woman can’t lead in the army or be a soldier’—it’s sort of that kind of thinking, like women aren’t good team members.”

She cites a Guardian article about whether the gender disparity is also a carryover from Shakespeare’s days, at least in part. English literature is so imbued with his work that the ratio of four male characters to every one woman is just what’s expected, and is still reflected on most stages throughout the world.

“We’ve gotten somehow to this ratio where there has to be more men on-stage instead of women, but it was even wrong for that time, particularly since Queen Elizabeth was the queen!” Raine says, laughing with exasperation. “Being a woman working in film and theatre and on TV, we’ve got to change the dynamic. I really admire the company doing Glengarry Glen Ross and they did The Winter’s Tale last year, an all-female company [Classic Chic]. That needs to happen more: we need more women writers being published and produced.”

Ensemble Theatre Company presents The Children’s Hour from Thursday (July 16) to August 6 in repertory at the Jericho Arts Centre.