The department of drama and speech held auditions for its first two shows, “The Children’s Hour” and “Camwood on the Leaves,” Wednesday and Thursday.

Both plays have been called thought-provoking.

“We’re not interested in doing museum pieces,” department chair Georgia Gresham said.

“We want young people to see the relevance in these shows.”

“The Children’s Hour,” by Lillian Hellman, will kick off the season.

The play is considered to be one of the great successes of Hellman’s career.

In the play, she examines “abnormal attachments” between women and what consequences those attachments might have on family and friends, such as betrayal.

Although the show was originally produced in 1934, Hellman remounted the show as a condemnation against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was the governmental body responsible for seeking out and persecuting enemies of the state during the McCarthy era.

Hellman swiftly turned the tables on the government when she stated, “To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable.

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

Gresham says she hopes that the universality of these issues will be just a poignant today as it was in the 1930s.

Anne Kauffman will direct the play in Marquette Theater on October 2-5.

Written when he was only 19, “Camwood on the Leaves,” by Wole Soyinka, tackles the spiritual and the social, with belief and ritual as integrating forces for social cohesion.

Soyinka’s language, imagination and implementation of myth and magic transcend the play’s immediate social contexts of totalitarianism, violence and social pretensions.

Drama department faculty member Lane Savadove, director of last season’s “Women and Water” and “A Lesson Before Dying,” will bring to life the experimental and moving play.

This play launched the young Nigerian’s career not only as a playwright, but also as a social commentator.

Sovinka would later win Africa’s first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

The performance is scheduled for November 7-9 and 13-15, 2003 in Lower Depths Theatre.

For more information, call the Box Office at 865-3824.