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.

Hands: windows into the soul

Is it just me, or do heavily arthritic hands remind anyone else of ginger roots, and vice versa? No? Alright.

Well anyway, these ginger roots particularly reminded me of Mary's hands. The overlapping knobs and knolls made me think of her hands, kneading, fretting... nervous. Mary's hands are the windows into her soul--or perhaps it would be better to say her lack thereof, as in her opinion, "everything comes between what you are and what you'd like to be, and [you lose] your true self forever" (61). But what is the "everything" that causes her to become essentially nothing? It is Benjamin's "catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage," the passage of unproductive time. It is the agonizing hours Mary spent in lonely hotel rooms expecting a better future, but unable to change neither Tyrone's past habits nor the way society is used to regarding her husband's profession as an actor. She is helpless like the angel, and carried, too, by "storm blowing from Paradise...what we call progress," brought into a future that materializes much less satisfactorily than she would have wished. 

And somewhere along the way, her "true self" gets lost. Frozen in the form of youth, she embalms it in morphine and stores it away in a place unreachable to lucidity. Perhaps that is what her hands are searching for as they "[flutter] over the bosom of her dress, up to her throat and hair, with a distracted aimlessness" (89). They are trying to recall the contours of her youth and feeling of her "true self," of her soul. 

Although these hands wander with a mind of her own, Mary cannot bear to look at them. When she does see her hands, she first "stares...with fascinated disgust." (104). Then she denounces them as "maimed and crippled! You'd think they'd been through some horrible accident!" (104). Finally "thrusts her hands behind her back" to avoid them because "they're worse than the foghorn for reminding me-" (104). Not only are Mary's hands the instruments of her own destruction as necessary accomplices to the act of shooting up, and even an excuse for the morphine prescription, but they are also a relic of a past when her hands wove dreams of a pianist's concert hall, and an ugly reminder of the contortion of that dream, too. 

I feel bad for Mary. Hands can be such beautiful things. The things they do define their owners. How must it feel to consider your own hands traitor to yourself? This, more than anything, makes me understand Mary's retrogression over the course of the play.

-Becca

On Performance — Katharine Hepburn

Please watch up to time mark 3:30.

"Mary. . .still has a young, graceful figure, a trifle plump, but showing little evidence of middle-aged waist and hips, although she is not tightly corseted. Her face is distinctly Irish in type. It must once have been extremely pretty, and is still striking. It does not match her healthy figure but is thin and pale with the bone structure prominent. [. . .] What strikes one immediately is her extreme nervousness. Her hands are never still. [. . .] Her most appealing quality is the simple, unaffected charm of a shy convent-girl youthfulness she has never lost—an innate unworldly innocence" (12-13).

I'm afraid I can't believe anything of "plumpness" about Ms. Hepburn, although her face is certainly "thin and pale, with bone structure prominent."

She does, however, present "extreme nervousness" and the "unaffected charm" of youth remarkably well. In my reading, I assumed Mary had some sort of tremor in her hand—akin to Parkinson's or Bell's Palsy—like Hepburn herself presented in her later life. I love that she chose just to be fidgety; moving so constantly that we can't tell if she has a tremor or not. Hepburn was fifty-five when the film came out, but there is absolutely something young, nostalgic, wistful, and even (the only word for it, really) cute about her description of meeting James.

I adore this monologue, but I'm a little bothered that I can't imagine it performed any other way after seeing this. I also can't think of any dramatic female role as complex without reaching back to Shakespeare. . . possibly Shaw's Eliza Doolittle? Any theatre types want to weigh in (Ryan)?
kz

Let’s Get-a Ultra Meta

Posted by Jack Flynn

Sorry to everyone for the lame title and lateness of this post. I know I can’t get credit for it anymore at this point, but I would feel bad if my opinion surrounding this play weren’t thrown into the abyss of cyberspace so…

One thing I immediately noticed about Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the fact that the Tyrone family is a family of theater actors being played by actors in a theater. How delightfully self-referential, right? And the great thing about it is that it’s not meta for no reason. I think it actually mirrors the play’s themes in a really cool way while tying into the themes we’ve been discussing in class of generational tension, progress, and our relationship to the past.

After all, the Tyrone family is a family that seems to feel stuck in the past. Fingers are constantly being pointed in regards to what examples were set and what paths were defined for people by those who came before them (i.e. the idea of a son feeling pushed into the same career as his father or a father blaming an older son for setting a bad example for the younger son).

This, in my mind, makes the author’s decision to make the family full of actors a wise one. After all, what is the family doing if not making a casting complaint? They are frustrated that over generations, the same play is being performed and each seems to feel that they are a helpless victim, stuck reading a script they didn’t write for themselves.

On top of this, I think there’s an additional self-referential element introduced in the form of surveillance. On page 17, Mary says, “You really must not watch me all the time, James. I mean, it makes me self-conscious.” Bad news, Mary, but you’re being watched by an audience constantly. And so are all the other characters who seem incredibly concerned with who sees what, who’s making jokes about whom, and who is privy to what information all while laying out their insecurities and bad behavior in a neatly defined narrative arc for a different set of strangers every night. It’s funny stuff.  

Journeying into Night and Spacetime (sort of)

In Act One and Act Two there are three scenes. The first scene is set in exquisite detail, where O'Neill describes everything from the books on the wall to the rug on the floor in the living room of the Tyrone's summer home. It is morning. The setting for Act 2, Scene One is described by nothing more than the words "the same". The time is now a quarter to one in the afternoon. The setting of Act Two, Scene Two is "the same, about a half hour later".

This made me curious. I looked at the first line of the settings for Act Three and Four and the settings are both "the same". Again, the time has progressed: the Act Three is at 6:30 pm and Act Four is around midnight. The title, A Long Day's Journey Into Night makes a lot more sense now, seeing as the entire novel takes place in a day, but what is interesting is that the "journey" is a static one. Nobody really goes anywhere; the entire novel takes place in James Tyrone's living room. The last time I had a discussion about a motionless play of this kind was when we went to see Prometheus Bound. However what makes the static progression of this play so interesting is that the characters in this play are lying with every breath. It begs the question, "Where are we getting our information from?"

It's clearly not from the dialogue, and it's not from the character's actions (because in addition to not going anywhere they really don't do much, besides drink of course). To me, this explains why O'Neill's stage instructions had to be so detailed in comparison to his dialogue: our main sources of information on the characters' personalities are things like their tone of speech, their mannerisms, and most importantly of all, the way they look at one another (or the lack thereof).