THE Playwrights Theatre’s current mission to stage all forty-nine of Eugene O’Neill’s plays during the next eight years will provide New Yorkers with a wealth of gin-soaked poetry and genius, but one aspect of the playwright’s oeuvre will go unheralded—his stage directions. Each line of the reconstituted playlet that follows is borrowed from one of O’Neill’s plays.
JOHN (appears from the front parlor in a great state of flushed annoyance)
MARY (trying to appear casual)
JOHN (carefully examining the front of her dress)
MARY (writhing—thinking)
JOHN (He stares at it with a strange, stupid dread.)
MARY (She sees he has guessed her secret and at first she quails and shrinks away, then stiffens regally and returns his gaze unflinchingly.)
JOHN (He stares at her, stunned and stupid.)
MARY (with a low tender cry as if she were awakening to maternity)
JOHN (nodding his head several times—stupidly)
MARY (stung but pretending indifference—with a wink)
JOHN (His face grows livid in spite of the sunburn.)
MARY (She seems to be aware of something in the room which none of the others can see—-perhaps the personification of the ironic life force that has crushed her.)
JOHN (frothing at the mouth with rage)
MARY (unruffledly—obsessed)
JOHN (He makes a motion across his neck with his forefinger.)
MARY (with a moaning sound)
JOHN (He presses his lips tightly together—an effort to appear implacable that gives his face the expression of a balky animal’s.)
MARY (looking at him queerly)
JOHN (He whirls defensively with a snarling, murderous growl, crouching to spring, his lips drawn back over his teeth, his small eyes gleaming ferociously.)
MARY (She raps him smartly, but lightly, on his bald spot with the end of her broom handle.)
JOHN (pounding his temples with his fists—tortured)
MARY (Their physical attraction becomes a palpable force quivering in the hot air.)
JOHN (He hides his face in his hands and weeps like a fat child in a fit of temper.)
MARY (more and more obsessed by a feeling of guilt, of being a condemned sinner alone in the threatening night)
JOHN (He begins to sob, and the horrible part of his weeping is that it appears sober, not the maudlin tears of drunkenness.)
MARY (with a return to her natural tone—but hysterical)
JOHN (spitting disgustedly)
MARY (spits also)
JOHN (He spits leisurely.)
MARY (spitting calmly)
JOHN (Iterrible look of murder comes on his face.)
MARY (She takes his head and presses it to her breast and begins to weep. Weeping.)
JOHN (In a frenzy of self-abnegation, as he says the last words he beats his head on the flagstones.)
MARY (As for her, during his speech she has listened, paralyzed with horror, terror, her whole personality crushed, beaten in, collapsed, by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless.)
JOHN (He begins to laugh, softly at first—a laugh so full of a complete acceptance of life, a profound assertion of joy in living, so devoid of all self-consciousness or fear, that it is like a great bird song triumphant in depths of sky, proud and powerful, infectious with love, casting on the listener an enthralling spell.)
MARY (They both chuckle with real, if alcoholic, affection.)
JOHN (His voice is heard in a gentle, expiring sigh of compassion, followed by a faint dying note of laughter that rises and is lost in the sky like the flight of his soul back into the womb of Infinity.)
MARY (In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending.)
JOHN (He gulps and his lips twitch.)
MARY (more and more strongly and assertively, until at the end she is a wife and mother)
JOHN (He falls forward on his face, twitches, is still.)
MARY (with a strange cruel smile of gloating over the years of self-torture)
JOHN (He dies, laughing up at the sky.)
MARY (Her face is again that of a vindictive maniac.)
1998