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Certain
details reported by O'Neill's biographers betray an interesting and
ironic struggle by the playwright with his chosen medium. These
struggles as a matter of O'Neill's own psychology may be of no great
interest, but as they are reflected in the way O'Neill shaped his
scripts, they are of central importance to anyone working on any of his
plays, for the study or for the stage. Some of the tensions resulting
from O'Neill's struggle against the confines of his own medium are
detectable even in a brief history of his management of setting and
scenery. For
scenic displays, for bustle, color, noise, most of us today are used to
an entertainment delivery system in which we turn to the movies and
television. We turn to the theatre for language, often language that
seeks to oppose or upset our presuppositions rather than gratify them.
We maintain no grand expectations about the illusion of the
"real" from the stage designer. We have been trained by our
experience in the theatre to be content with the merest sketch of a
setting: a pool of light on the stage level suggesting the battlements
at Elsinore, or a long drape up center to signal Gertrude's chamber. But
in O'Neill's day, and certainly during his youth, before the out-break
and subsequent epidemic spread of cinema, the theatre was the place to
see striking and impressive visual effects. A playwright trying to
stretch the limitations of the theatre as he found it in those days
certainly had a duty to demand more, not less, of the settings. Through
the first part of O'Neill's career as a playwright, until the
mid-thirties, he called for sets that aspired to extend the
stage-designer's task, and budget, rather than simplify them. Thus
for a mere one-act play intended for a tiny stage in Greenwich Village,
he called for a huge white room, and then a dark, tropical jungle. And
the theatre responded. Jig Cook took the idea of the Kuppelhorizont
that Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth Macgowan had brought back from
Germany to erect a plaster dome around the back and over the top of the
stage area. American theatre people today call it a
"cyclorama." It could be lighted from the floor level to
suggest distant sky and not the cramped, back-stage in which the
production of Emperor Jones
was actually mounted. The
two acts of All God's Chillun' Got Wings called for an exterior in Act I, and an
interior in Act II. But the last scene of the four in Act I is a
different exterior from the one in the previous three. And Act II,
though ostensibly set in same "place," calls for three scene
changes as the walls and ceilings, like something from the silent film, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, close in on the characters. All for
a play that runs, not counting the time required for scene-shifting, a
bare forty to fifty minutes. The
eight scenes of "The Hairy Ape" require eight sets, two of which are fully
lit, the second on the promenade deck of a ship, the fifth, "a
corner of Fifth Avenue in the Fifties on a fine Sunday
morning"(202). But all the rest suggest darkness or confinement or
both in the forecastle, the stokehole, a prison, a cage in a zoo, and
both the inside and the outside of the IWW union headquarters, at
twilight, in moonlight, at night. Later
still, as O'Neill was turning production of his plays over to the
Theatre Guild, he expanded his demands even farther, calling for
frequent changes of vast settings, of which Marco
Millions is a striking example. The budget, at this stage of his
career, seemed no concern of his, though occasionally, upon seductive
application from Lawrence Langer, he grudgingly reduced his
requirements. The Gelbs' biography cites a letter from Langer to
O'Neill, clothing the Guild's budgetary concerns about the size of the
production in aesthetic qualms about losing concentration of effect (O'Neill
633). Any
production these days of any of these plays, even of Emperor
Jones reduces these requirements. The budget and modern impatience
with the least longeur in a
production of any kind, commands it. Film, television and their various
technical progeny, because they can provide constant action, have
generated a taste for constant action to which theatre must adapt to
survive. Theatre performers face auditors whose training in spectacle
has been almost entirely in front of some sort of screen. Even in O'Neill's day, audiences were not infinitely patient with long waits between scenes. The text of Emperor Jones calls for six different jungle settings in the last seven scenes of the play. Heywood Broun's review of it in the New York Herald on November 4, 1920 (cited in Cargill, Fogel, and Fisher, O'Neill and his Plays), while commending the sets as "fine and imaginative, and the staging effects uncommonly beautiful," (145-146) complained of the waits between scenes "of several minutes in length"(145). Any production these days uses the same setting for all seven jungle scenes, with action in different parts of the setting under lights from differing angles and of a different color. |
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The
name of David Belasco, in part thanks to strenuous public relations work
by Belasco himself, has become closely associated with a kind of
detailed "realism" of settings in this period. James O'Neill
had worked with Belasco on a San Francisco religious spectacle ten years
before Eugene O'Neill was born. The elder O'Neill still respected the
producer. In the twenties Belasco was still active in the theatre.
Eugene O'Neill sent him Marco
Millions for possible production in 1924, though, like everyone else
in the Provincetown crowd, he had long used Belasco's name as a synonym
of a kind of superficial and factitious realism in staging, a kind that
has also become associated with the box set. The
box set had become a standard for serious plays by the time Eugene
O'Neill was ten or twelve years old. Three walls, a ceiling, a rug on
the floor, functioning doors and windows were standard. Generalized
lighting, to produce the effect of a normal interior, was standard too.
But exteriors put some awkward demands before a set designer bent upon
that kind of "realism." The box set is perfect to show
boundaries, walls, limits on a stage. But showing the absence of
boundaries is difficult. And open sets, with hardly any boundaries at
all within the acting area, appear in O'Neill's earliest one-acts, like
"Thirst," and "Fog." The former is on a life-raft in
an otherwise empty ocean. The latter uses a similar set, a life-boat
drifting perilously close to an ice-berg. The action of the play depends
on a fog from the iceberg which completely hides the characters from any
would-be rescuers. This fog is the precursor of one of the most
persistent images in O'Neill's stage-craft, and an image too of his own
problems with his own writing (Field, 194). Citing
the difficulties posed by these sets might have been one of the
corrective observations by George Pierce Baker in 1914. Certainly many
of O'Neill's next plays use standard box sets of interiors, living
rooms. The one-act sea plays between 1915 and 1919 are almost all set in
cramped rooms, smokey bars, or "below" in bunk rooms. With
"The Moon of the Caribees," however, O'Neill is back to trying
for distances again, with a play set on deck, midships, in moonlight,
within sight and earshot of a tropical island. "In the rear, the
dark outline of the port bulwark is sharply defined against a distant
strip of coral beach, white in the moonlight, fringed with coco palms
whose tops rise clear of the horizon."(3) The cramped crew's
quarters are just off-stage in this set. The
one-act, "The Rope," has it both ways. The set is both open
and closed. It is an interior with a rear vista on the sea and its
horizon. One can watch the sunset through it during the action of the
play, and throughout hear "from the rocks below the muffled motions
of the breaking waves."(166) It is easy to point out plays by other
writers which call for a similar set; the effect is not unique to
O'Neill. The first and third sets in his father's version of The Count of Monte Cristo are examples. The set for Sidney Howard's They
Knew What They Wanted is another. O'Neill's
first full-length play to be produced, in 1920, calls for nothing so
subtle as that in "The Rope." The scenes of Beyond
the Horizon alternate between the claustrophobic boxed set for the
interior of the Mayo farm house and the open fields of the Mayo farm
running down to the sea. J. D. Williams, the producer, seems to have
saved himself some money on this production by getting up the sets from
stocks pieces he had in storage. Stage hands took much too long to erect
the Mayo farm house or to strike it again for each of the set-changes.
Critics of the production complained of the alternation of the settings,
referring as well to the tedium of waiting. O'Neill's letters reveal his
irritation with their judgment, but he ignored the evidence that the
length of changes bothered the critics. Instead, as the second volume of
Louis Sheaffer's biography reports, he simply pounced on Alexander
Woollcott's comment in the Times
that alternating the settings inside and out was impractical. Sheaffer
quotes O'Neill's letter to Barrett H. Clark in which he complains that
critics simply did not "get" the symbolism of the alternation
of the visual imagery between the boxed and the open sets (Sheaffer
10-11). The
set for Desire Under the Elms
puts the house on stage, divided into four rooms, one or more of which
are to be either visible to the audience, or hidden from it, as the
action requires. In addition to this quadruple box, O'Neill calls for a
view of the exterior of the house, the yard, the elms drooping down over
it. The set description requires a stone wall around the yard with a
wooden gate at one side of the set, and view of the sky in the
background. A path leads through the gate, to town, to the sea, and
eventually to California. Another down stage exit leads ostensibly to
the barn and its comfortable cows. During the action of the play, heads
pop in and out of windows, characters yearn at each other through walls,
run up and down stairs at the back of the set, peer through doors, and
in the fourth of the play's twelve scenes, two of them throw stones and
break a window, and one dismantles that gate and carries it off stage. Most
of the critical commentary on the setting for this play, after some
reference to those elms in the title, concentrates on the division of
the house into the four rooms in which action maybe serially or
simultaneously visible. Very little critical commentary takes into
account how much trouble O'Neill has in making use of this set. Much of
the action takes place in the kitchen, and much that takes place in
other parts of the setting could have been written so that it too took
place in kitchen and on an exterior porch adjacent. In
his letter to Clark about critical insensitivity to Beyond
the Horizon, O'Neill had already made the point that he could have
put all the action of that play in a single set, the Mayo kitchen (Sheaffer,
10-11). O'Neill, of course, could have set this play too entirely in the
kitchen. In Desire Under the Elms,
he could have merely evoked that parlour by report, with its heady
symbolism of propriety, courtship, and funerals, connections of which
most people in a modern audience are, alas, utterly ignorant. He puts it
on stage. Yet he has only one scene take place there. In the upper
portion of this demanding set he put those two bed-rooms with walls
opaque to all but desire. If the scene in which Abbie and Eben yearn
blindly for each other through that solid wall were staged in some other
way, all the other bedroom scenes could be re-staged in other places or
reported by the characters. Such writing is "easier" on the
writer, and requires much less attention to the elaborate
traffic-control and covering action in stage directions which O'Neill
had to insert, while trying to focus on a scene in one room, to account
for all those characters visible in other parts of the set. A
play often paralleled with Desire
Under the Elms indeed, even suggested as a source of it, is Sidney
Howard's big hit of 1924, winner of the Pulitzer Prize that year, They
Knew What They Wanted. Roughly the same kind of staging is required
by both plays. Howard's set is smooth and simple. Off stage in one
direction is a kitchen. Off in another is the central figure's bedroom.
The audience is to accept the area between these as the central figure's
living room. In the back wall, windows and a wide central door open on a
porch, and the audience is asked to imagine that steps lead from the
porch downward, and further upstage, to an invisible yard, the road, the
vineyards, etc. Some of the ostensible action is out of sight, upstage,
described and reacted to by characters watching from the upstage central
doorway to the porch. In
contrast with a model like this one in Howard's play, so smooth, such
room for flowing action, such professional economy of means, O'Neill
instead demands a chopped-up, cut-off, walled-in image, full of
divisions, obstacles, requiring movement back and forth, up and down, in
and out. He seeks, evidently, not harmony, but frisson; not to soothe, but to grate. The different impressions of
the sets are quite consistent with the different impressions of the two
plays, They Knew What They Wanted
with its soothing and rather shallow optimism, contrasted with the dark
and abrasive conflicts of O'Neill's tragedy. O'Neill's
sets underline deeper impulses in other plays.
Mourning Becomes Electra calls for a "special curtain"
which "shows the house from the street. From this, in each play,
one comes to the exterior of the house in the opening act and enters it
in the following act."(224) The rest of the passage requires that
this curtain suggest extensive ground around the house, woods in the
background, orchards on one side, flower gardens, a green house on the
other, and fronted by a long curved drive. O'Neill's directions seem to
call, on a stage, for everything that only the cinema can give. The
"special curtain" has all the marks of the opening
"establishing shot" which every movie patron has been trained
to expect. Another phrasing of the same observation is that O'Neill
seems to ask for both an open set with a wide view of the Mannon lands,
and at the same time for a narrow, enclosed box interior. Many
of his plays are set entirely or partly in bars. These settings are
always divided into two rooms. Obviously, the bars O'Neill frequented in
the Village were also divided into two rooms. But O'Neill, despite the
scripts which in every case could have been developed in one of the
rooms, shows or strongly suggests both of them, sometimes, as in The
Iceman Cometh, dividing the set from the front to the back. The one
in The Iceman Cometh is
preceded in O'Neill's career by ones with similar shapes in the early
one-act, "The Long Journey Home," in the first scene of Anna
Christie and in Act III, Scene 1 of Ah,
Wilderness! Each of them spreads a group of tables and chairs across
the stage; each has a doorway leading up to "the rooms." The
tavern that holds the action of A Touch of the Poet has its entrances, exits, and windows in
different places on the set from these others, but it has all the same
facilities. And like many of these bars, it is divided. All of them have
two main rooms: the bar room and the room with tables. For our purposes
here, the key element in these bar settings is this division that
appears with such frequency in his sets. Another
element obviously repeated in his plays is the sea. Putting the sea on
stage, as O'Neill required in those two early one-acts,
"Thirst" and Fog," is a serious obstacle to
"realism" as it was then understood for scene decoration. For
the sets of later plays, he calls instead for the edge of the sea,
another dividing line between an open area and the closed area of the
action. The more mature one-acts take place on ships. In "Moon of
the Caribees," the play's theme is underlined by the low horizontal
back wall of the set, dividing the violent and vulgar foreground action
from the sea and the barely visible, distant and romantic island. That
set for "The Rope" and two of the scenes of Beyond
the Horizon evoke the sea's edge, the shore. All of the action of Anna
Christie takes place in sets where the sea is just off-stage, a
waterfront bar or on a barge. One of the earlier versions of Anna Christie, "Chris Christopherson," puts much of the
action in the second half on a ship. "The
Hairy Ape" generates another kind of contrast as it opens below
decks, moves to the promenade deck, then to the dark hell of the
stoke-hold. The last scene of Strange
Interlude takes place on "the afterdeck of the Evans' motor
cruiser in the lane of yachts near the finish line at
Poughkeepsie"(187). Half the cast spends the whole scene up-stage,
peering into infinite distance, trying to see the race. The other half
huddles on the forestage, working through another variation of Nina's
domination of and accommodation to the men in her life. The first and
last scene of the Great God Brown
are "on the Pier and the Casino."(257, 324) Part of Act IV of
the middle play in Mourning
Becomes Electra takes place inside Adam Brant's ship and part of it
on deck, or on the wharf beside it. And the sea, with its fogs and
fog-horns, is never far away in Long
Day's Journey Into Night. These
sea-side sets, like so many others mandated by O'Neill's set
descriptions, display division. The action and dialogue in these sets
repeatedly insists on a contrast between a confining area and a free,
even limitless and formless one, like the open sea, outside or beyond
it. Characters in Beyond the
Horizon constantly contrast the farm for its safety or its
confinement, to the sea, for its freedoms or its dangers. Anna
Christie and its precursor, "Chris Christopherson" have
characters explain time and again how they are neither on land nor at
sea. One scene in Ah, Wilderness!
is on a moonlit beach; Richard Miller sits half in and half out of a
rowboat that is partly in the water and partly on the sand. He meets his
girl friend who prefers to stand half-hidden in the shadow, and they
talk about how afraid they are of what they want to do. The action for Long
Day's Journey Into Night is in a sea-side summer cottage, and
characters talk about the fog from the first scene to the last. Of
course, O'Neill himself felt most at ease in places near the sea, near
water of some kind, and it is easy to dismiss these repeated references
to the water and the water's edge as one of O'Neill's personality
quirks. Those
who see the plays may not share those quirks. These edges, endings,
boundaries in any one play are part of a system which a theatrical
audience struggles to bring to some order. They need help. O'Neill's
sets betray a cinematic lust to overleap the limitations of theatre. The
vocabulary he offers in his dialogue, loaded with vast and passionate
abstractions, betrays the desire to stage the essence of emotion, rather
than any on-stage objective correlative for it. He writes long speeches
of agonized emotion, as if to show passion itself instead of the
character who suffers it. Of course, it can't be done. O'Neill knew it.
Its very impossibility seems to be what attracted him to it, for only
then could he be sure to fail. But here we totter on the brink of
psychology. Let us withdraw from the abyss, and return to something solid, like sets. Those rooms, cluttered with tables and chairs so that players can hardly ever cross to another and touch, but must shout across the furniture, those curtains, walls that divide the sets in parts, and those huge vistas, often stated, sometimes staged, those houses set up center against a sky, as in Desire Under the Elms or A Moon for the Misbegotten, are all eloquent. These contrary impulses for both closures and expansions, sometimes almost simultaneous ones, that an O'Neill script offers to an audience, force themselves upon the attention of anyone who directs an O'Neill play or designs sets for one. Design and direction help auditors recognize that these plays make available, to those willing to "read" the scene in that way, embodiments of tensions, self-contradictions, divisions, not just in the author's aims, but in the ways his characters struggle with self, in the way that O'Neill as an artist, struggled with his medium, made the content of the script struggle against the very form that embodies it. |
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