Stage Directions and the Poetry of O'Neill

In the make-up class discussion, one thing that kept coming up repeatedly that I thought was interesting is the beauty and detail of O'Neill's stage directions, which is something that has also been mentioned on this blog. While I am a huge fan of O'Neill, as someone who spends his free time reading plays (and particularly from O'Neill's era), I honestly find them not particularly stand-out.

Just because I'm a major drama nerd, I looked through some of my absolute favorite plays at the stage directions to compare them to those in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Because I know we all have a copy of the play, I'm not going to take up gratuitous amounts of space with the opening stage directions of the play, but if you'd like to check out the comparison for yourself, I'd invite you to read them now to cross-check them against the examples I'm about to post.

One comment that kept coming up repeatedly was how intricately detailed the stage directions were, and how it helped the reader picture the Tyrone's home with vivid precision. While I don't disagree, it's not particularly unheard of for a playwright to go into so much detail, and there are playwright who give even less liberties to the scenic designers of their plays.

For example, here are the opening stage directions of Act II of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, describing Professor Higgins' house:

Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins's laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is a room on the first floor, looking on the street, and was meant for the drawing-room. The double doors are in the middle of the back hall; and persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. In this corner stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, showing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.

Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with a comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table is a stand for newspapers.

On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor, is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the telephone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall, is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest from the door, and a bench for the player extending the full length of the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly chocolates.

The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy chair, the piano bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray chair. It stands near the fireplace. On the walls, engravings; mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.



Pygmalion was first produced in 1912, twenty-nine years before O'Neill began to write Long Day's Journey Into Night (and, by a strange coincidence, the same year in which O'Neill's play takes place). This demonstrates that there had been a tradition of intricate stage directions before O'Neill, in which playwrights would map out there sets inch-by-inch, with possible hazards to creative license.

Not only have O'Neill's stage directions been described as detailed, but also as beautiful and somewhat poetic. While I don't disagree with this statement, either, I would argue that O'Neill's contemporaries described their settings with even more flowery diction and description.

Take, for example, the opening stage directions to Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie:

The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.

The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire-escape is included in the set - that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it.

The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

[At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. This building, which runs parallel to the footlights, is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clothes-lines, garbage cans, and the sinister lattice-work of neighbouring fire-escapes. It is up and down these alleys that exterior entrances and exits are made, during the play. At the end of Tom's opening commentary, the dark tenement wall slowly reveals (by means of a transparency) the interior of the ground floor Wongfield apartment.

Downstage is the living-room, which also serves as a sleeping-room for Laura, the sofa is unfolding to make her bed. Upsatge, centre, and divided by a wide arch or second pro-scenium with transparent faded portières (or second curtain), is the dining-room. In an old fashioned what-not in the living-room are seen scores of transparent glass animals. A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living-room, facing the audience, to the left of the archway. It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say 'I will be smiling forever'.

The audience hears and sees the opening scene in the dining-room through both the transparent fourth wall of the building and the transparent gauze portières of the dining-room arch. It is during this revealing scene that the fourth wall slowly ascends out of sight. This transparent exterior wall is not brought down again until the very end of the play, during Tom' s final speech.

The narrator is an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever licence with dramatic convention is convenient to his purpose.

Williams' elegant style achieves both detail and poetry in an eloquent display of linguistic mastery, and one feels the haunting atmosphere of the play creeping in before the first lines have even been spoken. The play premiered in 1944, just two years after O'Neill's play had been finished. Perhaps Williams was influenced by O'Neill's writings, but they were more or less contemporaries.

And finally, in a similar display of both detail and poetry, here are the opening stage directions to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, another one of my all-time favorites, written in 1949 (seven years after Long Day's Journey Into Night):

A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, tell- ing of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.

Before us is the Salesman’s house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides. Only the blue light of the sky falls upon the house and forestage; the sur- rounding area shows an angry glow of orange. As more light ap- pears, we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of the dream dings to the place, a dream rising out of reality. The kitchen at center seems actual enough, for there is a kitchen table with three chairs, and a refrig- erator. But no other fixtures are seen. At the back of the kitchen there is a draped entrance, which leads to the living room. To the right of the kitchen, on a level raised two feet, is a bedroom fur- nished only with a brass bedstead and a straight chair. On a shelf over the bed a silver athletic trophy stands. A window opens onto the apartment house at the side.

Behind the kitchen, on a level raised six and a half feet, is the boys’ bedroom, at present barely visible. Two beds are dimly seen, and at the back of the room a dormer window. (This bedroom is above the unseen living room.) At the left a stairway curves up to it from the kitchen.

The entire setting is wholly or, in some places, partially trans- parent. The roof-line of the house is one-dimensional; under and over it we see the apartment buildings. Before the house lies an apron, curving beyond the forestage into the orchestra. This for- ward area serves as the back yard as well as the locale of all Willy’s imaginings and of his city scenes. Whenever the action is in the present the actors observe the imaginary wall-lines, entering the house only through its door at the left. But in the scenes of the past these boundaries are broken, and characters enter or leave a room by stepping »through« a wall onto the forestage.

From the right, Willy Loman, the Salesman, enters, carrying two large sample cases. The flute plays on. He hears but is not aware of it. He is past sixty years of age, dressed quietly. Even as he crosses the stage to the doorway of the house, his exhaustion is apparent. He unlocks the door, comes into the kitchen, and thank- fully lets his burden down, feeling the soreness of his palms. A word-sigh escapes his lips — it might be, "Oh, boy, oh, boy." He closes the door, then carries his cases out into the living room, through the draped kitchen doorway.

Linda, his wife, has stirred in her bed at the right. She gets out and puts on a robe, listening. Most often jovial, she has developed an iron repression of her exceptions to Willy’s behavior — she more than loves him, she admires him, as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties, served her only as sharp reminders of the turbulent longings within him, longings which she shares but lacks the temperament to utter and follow to their end.



I don't mean for these examples to be used in criticism against O'Neill's talents in any way, but rather to examine them in a new way. I think that O'Neill was writing for a different aim, for a new kind of play. O'Neill's dialogue has been described as non-poetic, and purposefully so, and I believe that his stage directions are exemplary of this rule rather than an exception to it. Although I wouldn't describe the dialogue as strictly bland; Edmund has some beautiful dialogue in Act IV during his conversation with his father, and Mary fades in and out of exceptional speech in her dialogue. Perhaps the stage directions represent a similar pattern; their beauty is transient, and ebbs in and out like the waves of the sea that O'Neill so adored. O'Neill wrote the layman in his plays, and in doing so, he achieved a harsher form of realism than had ever before been realized on the stage.