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Aesthetics Of Oya In Reading, Casting, And Staging Lillian Hellman’S The Children’S Hour, Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

In the eighteen years between the play’s opening at the Maxine Elliot Theatre and 1952, Lillian Hellman’s 1934 version of The Children’s Hour undergoes a dramaturgical evolution. As Hellman evolved as a playwright and queer woman, she revisits the play several times, altering character attributes and modifying content. In Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), Hellman describes this process of revision as pentimento writing, “later choice[s], [are] a way of seeing and then seeing again” (309). Hellman’s amendments were the inspiration for the conceptual approach used in the 2018 William & Mary Theatre production of The Children’s Hour—a framework …