Retelling queer stories: the midnight hour

In 1934, Lillian Hellman wrote one of her most controversial plays—The Children’s Hour. Originally, this play follows the story of two women who own and run a boarding school for girls. A troublesome student, Mary, decides that she doesn’t like the punishment she has received, so she tells her grandmother, a wealthy and popular woman of the town, that she has seen the two schoolteachers kissing each other. In telling this lie, the women are faced with losing the school, their reputation, and their social lives. One of the women, Martha, realizes that she does, in fact, have feelings for her friend, Karen. In realizing this information, Martha leaves the room and kills herself out of shame.

Hellman has been quoted saying that the play is about the morality of the lie, not the queer relationship that is used to tell this lie. Over the past several years, I have done research into whether or not The Children’s Hour is a morality play or just simply queer. After taking a theoretical approach and working on a MFA thesis production with director, Ann Kreitman, I came to the conclusion that we should not be staging Hellman’s 1934 script. Even if it isn’t about the queer relationship, the fact of the matter is that it is queer. Staging her play today is problematic to say the least—we’ve seen queer trauma time and time again; how do we move forward through that trauma? In my modern adaptation of The Children’s Hour, now called The Midnight Hour, I try to do just that—acknowledge the historic trauma while also moving through it in order to create a Queer future. In this adaptation, the queer person does not die. Queerness is celebrated. And the past influences the present while inspiring a new future.