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. In 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.