Sex, Lies, and Revisions: Historicizing Hellman's The Children's Hour

Sex, Lies, and Revisions: Historicizing Hellman's The Children's Hour JENNY S. SPENCER An original box office success, Lillian Hellman's frequently anthologized and easily available play The Children's Hour is rarely revived on the professional stage, yet continues to be widely performed by community and college theatres in the U.S. and abroad. Clearly, the lesbian themes that stirred such vociferous controversy with original audiences in 1934 appear quite different to contemporary audiences: this is not a play that a feminist director would eagerly seek out, despite the powerful (some would say melodramatic) experience it provides for its audiences. ]n addition to its retrograde treatment of lesbianism , the play has frequently been criticized for implausible character motivation, melodramatic plotting, and shifts in thematic emphasis that undermine its otherwise well-made structure. Were The Children's Hour a "forgotten " play, the question of how to approach it today might be different, but the archival research whereby "lost" plays are discovered and subsequently revived seems unnecessary for a play that still resonates so strongly in the public imagination" Yet canonical familiarity has its own disadvantages. Reproducing The Children's Hour as a literary artifact may have extended its stage life and solidified (for better or worse) its literary reputation. But it has done so at the expense of the play's own history as an unstable, evolving, and ever-problematic script. Indeed, I would argue that the value of Hellman's play for us today is in its invitation to engage in the kind of "complex seeing" that Brecht found essential to an historicizing attitude (44).2 A number of things happen when we suspend the question of what the play means, to look at the history of the play's creation, productions, adaptations, and critical reception over three decades. We discover, first, that neither Hellman nor her audiences were ever entirely happy with this play; second, that an "original" or "authorized" version of The Children's Hour is difficult to pin down; and third, that Hellman's own unacknowledged relationship to both the play's source and its themes must complicate any assessment of her work. Modern Drama, 47:I (Spring 2004) 44 Historicizing Hellman's The Children's Hour 45 Hellman was aware of the play's potential weaknesses: she obsessed over its meaning, worrying about how the audience would understand her characters and how they would react to the lesbian themes. Indeed, Hellman's original notes show The Children's Hour to be the most heavily revised of all her subsequent plays, with six full drafts completed before Herman Shumlin directed the first production in 1934, and she continued to revise well after its initial run (Triesch).' In 1952, Hellman returned to direct the Broadway production on which the current acting edition is based, making further small revisions in the script, some of which remain in the definitive Collected Works of 1972 on which anthologized versions are now based. The play's status and popularity have been further affected by the existence of two readily available film versions . In t936, Goldwyn-United released William Wyler's highly acclaimed, but heavily censored, version of The Children's Hour. Retitled These Three, the screenplay was written by Hellman herself, turning the original lesbian content into a story about heterosexual infidelity to suit the censorship standards of the time. In 1961, Wyler restored the lesbian theme and title in a new film version of The Children's Hour.' With the help of screenwriter John Michael Hayes, the second film was far more faithful to the play Hellman directed in 1952, yet seemed hopelessly dated to audiences at the time of its release.4 In all of these versions, The Children's Hour presents itself as a play about a lie and its consequences, the thematic import of which is complicated by the fact that Mary's false accusations against Karen and Manha prove, on some level, to be true. Yet the "truths" that audiences take from this play, as well as the political import of its themes, have changed over time. Indeed, just as one lie or manipulative deception breeds another in Hellman's play, so, too, does the...