Archive, performance, and the lesbian canon: directing The children’s hour by Lillian Hellman

This thesis details my process for directing Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour as part of the University of Iowa’s mainstage 2022-2023 season. I sought to disrupt the play’s lesbian as well as mainstream canonical legacies with a radically reimagined production that drew on my lived experience of lesbophobia and desire for a queer future. The production strove to re-envision the lesbian canon by doubling back on our history, reexamining the archive, and reinterpreting historical text for contemporary audiences. In this re-envisioning, archive served as both a verb—to gather/document—and a noun—a space/memory that holds the record of lesbian herstory—as we cracked open the play’s realism and linear temporality. The following documents the production process from artistic impulse, playwright research, play analysis, design collaborations, direction, and rehearsal process, through post-production analysis of the experience. We began with physical improvisations around a children’s plastic playhouse, and collaborations in design meetings and rehearsals led us to writing new words to be spoken alongside the play, as well as to incorporate queer performance elements of drag and cabaret. These interventions led us to staging the play’s closeted queer desire and giving agency to the schoolgirls to remain onstage after their dismissal to represent and connect with young queer audiences of this traumatic historical work. This reimagining invited audiences into a new vision of the lesbian canon born from the queer theatrical archive.