Two versions of The Children's Hour have been staged. The original was used in the play's very successful premier at the Maxine Elliot Theatre in New York, starting on November 20, 1934. The play, produced and directed by Herman Shumlin, ran for a record-breaking 691 performances and immediately established Hellman's durable reputation. It also provoked considerable controversy.

The second version, staged in 1952, failed financially, although most critics and reviewers praised it. Hellman, in addition to making minor revisions in the script, directed the production. It opened at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway on December 18, ran for 189 performances, and later went on the road to play in Chicago, a city that had originally banned the work. Controversy still surrounded the piece, but the grounds had shifted away from the lesbian theme to the work's relevance to the congressional anti-communist hearings then in progress. It was in 1952 that Hellman, already blacklisted in Hollywood, was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Much of the notoriety surrounding the first production was based on what at the time was perceived as its sensational content. Shumlin knew the play would shock the audience, and so did Lee Shubert, the Elliot's owner, who, Hellman recounts in her memoir Pentimento, complained during rehearsals that the production "could land us all in jail." However, the New York authorities merely winked, though officials in Boston, Chicago, and London banned public performances of the play outright

The critical judgments passed on the initial staging were mostly favorable. Reviewer Ide Gruber, in Golden Book, was quick to label it a "powerful and gripping" adult drama, "well-written and well-acted." A few hailed Hellman a new genius of the "well made" play in the tradition of Ibsen and Anton Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard), touting, too, her courage as a writer willing to put her new career in harm's way with a frank treatment of a taboo subject. For Percy Hammond, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, the play had the power to make the audiences' "eyes start from their sockets," in scenes moving "so fast they almost tread upon one another's heels."

Some major critics demurred praise, however. Negative assessments mostly focused on the third act. According to Joseph Wood Krutch, reviewing the play in the Nation, although the first two acts were compelling, the last act was "so strained, so impossible, and so thoroughly boring that the effect is almost completely destroyed, and one is left to wonder that anything so inept was ever allowed to reach production." Other critics, including Brooks Atkinson and Stark Young, concurred, believing that the play was prone to melodramatic excess and engaged in too much postmortem moralizing following Martha's suicide. Even Hellman, in her ''Introduction'' to Six Plays, would later agree with that point, confessing that the last scene "was tense and overburdened," but claiming, as a "moral writer," that she could not avoid "that last summing-up " Audiences, however, seemed far less troubled by the play's final moments than the critics were, and they continued to flock to the production. There could be little argument over the play's success.

In contrast, the 1952 revival of the play, with a run less than a third as long, fared better in reviews than as a profitable investment for its backers. One common theme of the reviews was the idea that the play had lost none of its forceful impact in the eighteen years separating the productions: its power, as John Beaufort asserted in a review in the Christian Science Monitor , "to...