Setting the Stage. David Hays
my old teacher had so deeply touched them. No former student had ever asked for their help.
Now for the rest of the ground plan, starting with the two upstage entrances O’Neill calls for. Here his exact memory of the room overcame his ordinary common sense. There is simply no reason for two entrances, one to a rarely used front parlor, the other to the dining room. Years later I saw Olivier’s production of this play in London and he followed the stage directions exactly. Two entrances (archways, not doors) plus the wall between took up the entire upstage, and the value of changing light as the play progressed was lost. I used a single archway on the upstage end of the stage-right wall. The bay window is at right angles to this wall, angled itself; thus the bay slants downstage toward stage left, ending in a narrow screen door. Thus a center line to the room is sensed — it is as if we cut across a room at an angle. This is not easy to visualize, so I’ve included a simple floor plan.
Concerning furniture on the set. Around the central table were appropriate chairs: a heavy Morris chair for father, a wicker rocker for mama, and ordinary side chairs for the sons. The three bears — plus one. O’Neill calls for three wicker chairs, but I felt the differentiation was better in its small way. My main source for these items and others, such as a chandelier and water pitcher, was the 1912 Sears Roebuck catalog.
In the play, the father is generally rooted to his chair. The sons occasionally take a seat, but usually roam the whole room, particularly the restless Jamie during his bitter speeches. Mary Tyrone uses her rocker, but there was also room on the set for a wicker chaise longue, and it was a good variant for Mary.
In describing the furnishings, O’Neill makes a point of two bookcases. The father’s would contain classics such as Smollett’s Complete History of England, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and so on. The younger son’s would contain Marx, Wilde, Swinburne, and Kipling. Easy to show precisely, if a director chose, on a film close-up. The best a designer can do on the distant stage is to show one collection in leather bindings, the other in paper. And why not? Why not execute the playwright’s simple request in this case? We ignored or altered plenty of his suggestions. But then, how much does an audience see? Do not expect people to notice and analyze every detail, such as this choice of books. Yet the details build up. How many rooms do we enter and sense that they are just right, even at first glance?
A ground plan sketch for Long Day’s Journey into Night. Author’s collection.
In this instance, the bookcases play a role, separating the generations. In Act IV, the father growls to Edmund, “Where do you get your taste in authors? That damned library of yours! Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I’ve three good sets of Shakespeare there.”
One problem was to find room for these bookcases. The father’s bookcase could be a low built-in under the center bay window, between the chests. I felt that Edmund, representing O’Neill, should have a desk, a literary base in the room in contrast to the older, rootless brother. More about furniture choices later. But the stage-right wall, where I put his desk, was narrow. The solution was to put the bookcase on top of his desk, making it into a so-called secretary desk. I wanted him to have a wicker desk, similar to those often seen in seaside hotels, glass-topped, with a back rim of cubbyholes holding hotel stationery. It would look light, appropriately misplaced among the heavy furnishings, a summer note in a winter room. But there were no such desks in wicker, none that replaced the low cubbyholes with a three-or four-tier bookshelf. Trust me. But couldn’t there be? You shouldn’t fool around carelessly with great classic styles like Louis XIV or Chippendale. But some styles, such as Queen Anne, are more informal, and coffee tables (not known in her lifetime) have appeared; even flush toilets (also not known to the queen) are dressed up in her style, with seat covers incorporating fake wicker insets. These seem fair game, even if they somewhat pollute the style’s purity. So I reasoned that Mrs. Tyrone had simply gone to a local wicker maker, common artisans at that time, and ordered this piece for her son. No one complained.
Outside the windows I placed porch posts, vines, and a decorative rim running below the roof. This made sense because of the fog needed for Act III. How could you show there was fog without having something for the fog to conceal? To create this fog, we lowered a scrim (gauze curtain) between the windows and the porch posts and vines, and that scrim gauzed away the outside world. I also enjoyed the porch decoration because the roof rim was the only piece of the O’Neill’s actual house that we copied onstage.
Robert Edmond Jones, a designer who worked with O’Neill, liked symmetry, and he influenced the playwright. Designers can do that. I was once handed a play requiring six sets, with turntables. I saw no reason that it couldn’t be played on one set, and that was done, with the playwright and director’s agreement, thereby saving a ton of construction and operating expenses — and enhancing the play. My set was carefully described in the stage directions of the play when it was published. A student asked me years later, “So what did you do but exactly follow the playwright’s directions?” Expand this thought: the playwright also gleaned credit from others who worked on the first run because many of his poor speeches were cut by the director or producer, and some of the play’s best moments were inspired by them or by — yes — an actor.
O’Neill, surely influenced by Jones, calls for a table centered in the room. This is the gathering point of bitterness, anger, and guilt, centering the whirling accusations. José did not want it centered. It would be a tennis game, he noted: you look right, you look left. So the table wasn’t centered. However, because of the angles of the set, the perceived center line suggests that the table and the chandelier above it are centered in the room. Of course, this is an illusion — they are off-center, toward stage left, as José wished.
An electric cord plugged into the chandelier above the table ran down to a small lamp on the table. A nice touch asked for by O’Neill, indicating cheapness to a modern audience, who have a profusion of wall or floor outlets. As for the table itself, the trouble was that the round table called for in the stage directions caused sight-line problems. I discovered this while drawing it in the plan. The actor sitting at the upstage center of the table was hidden from the side audience by the heads of the actors seated at the sides of the table. The solution was to make the table oval, to shrink its up-and downstage measurement. This brought the upstage actor downstage a foot or so, enough to make him visible from the side seats. Easy. The table still looked round, and if it didn’t, so what? Years after this, José wrote in a memoir that he had instructed me to make the table oval. I was surprised that he had even noticed the alteration. I brought this up in my next conversation with Jason. “That’s the mildest of stings,” he said. “José took credit for inventing — and then instructed me on — every acting idea I ever had.”
Downstage left, I put a screen door leading out to the porch. There was a notion that the father would be seen sneaking along the porch as he goes to the cellar to get more whiskey, but this looked comic and was cut. The screen door was never used, and José didn’t like the way I initially positioned it. He wanted it facing more toward the audience, to serve as a background for much of Mary’s third-act speech in the foggy afternoon. So I nipped six inches from the bay windows and angled the door. Her speech is so sad in the enveloping gloom of the fog-bound afternoon, and it offers a strong contrast to the vitriol of the men: “You’re a sentimental fool,” she says, alone on the set. “What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent where you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin.”
Tharon Musser lit this play beautifully. I lit the rest of my plays, except one where I was fired and one other with Tharon. Tharon and I became close friends, and we often consulted to find solutions to scenery or lighting difficulties. After I started my own company, the National Theatre of the Deaf, I did not always have the time to spend on lighting. A set designer can design a set, oversee the building and painting, see it set up out of town, and visit from time to time. But the lighting designer is stuck