1.
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To improve “literary analysis skills” and comprehension by understanding cause and effect, the differences between fantasy and reality, and past and present.
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2.
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To improve writing skills by providing a variety of assignments, including the one-act autobiographical play.
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3.
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To understand dramatic elements, such as symbols, stage direction, and irony and how they are used in the context of the play.
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4.
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To help students explore and understand the intentions, characterizations, and meanings of
Long Day’s Journey
and to interpret the development or lack of it in the four characters.
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5.
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To enrich students’ vocabulary and to encourage them to use the vocabulary of the theater, such as: climax, exposition, atmosphere, dialogue, fantasy, setting, tragedy, stage directions, tempo, and theme.
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6.
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To have students look deeply into O’Neill’s view of his family experiences and his paradoxical vision of life.
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7.
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To have students appreciate the outstanding dramatic and psychological scope of Long
Day’s Journey
.
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8.
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To encourage students to bring
Long Day’s Journey
alive through oral reading at first and then as a scenario for an audience performance in the classroom.
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I expect students to keep a director’s or actor’s journal while thinking about, feeling, staging, and growing with the play. Moreover, they will write pertinent vignettes and other short pieces when they can take more time to think about and reflect on their experiences with the play. Before reading the play, the class will discuss the following questions: What responsibilities do parents have for their children at different stages of their life? What responsibilities do children have for their parents? As children become adults, how do the responsibilities change? What are the responsibilities that adult children should have toward their parents? What responsibilities should a person have toward him/herself? Are parents’ and adult childrens’ responsibilities often in conflict? This is one of the themes dealt with in the play.
In reading and acting out the play, students must envision the setting, visualize the action, understand and interpret the dialogue, and imagine the stage directions which are copiously given by O’Neill. The setting for
Long Day’s Journey
is the living room of the Tyrone family’s summer home on the New London coast in August, 1912. It is around 8:30 a.m. when the play begins. Sunshine comes through the window. The room is ordinary and unpretentious, comfortable, but rather shabby. The two bookcases are emphasized during different scenes and their contents add understanding to the play. One small bookcase contains “novels by Balzac, Zola, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Max Stirner; plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg; poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Earnest Dowson, Kipling, etc.” This seems to hold Edmund’s books. The other glassed-in bookcase contains sets of Shakespeare, history books, “and miscellaneous volumes of old plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland.” The books reflect the individual interests and passions of Tyrone and Edmund. Later in the play, Tyrone will state the authors which Edmund admires and remark that Edmund’s interest in literature is for “filth and despair and pessimism.” I will assign one or two authors for each student to research, in order for them to understand what their beliefs were and why Tyrone called them “madmen, fools and atheists.”
Important also to the setting are the “two double doorways with portieres” which lead to the living room. O’Neill points out that one leads to a front parlor and the other leads into a dark back parlor which is used as a hallway to the dining room. According to Doris V. Falk, the stage set plays a symbolical role in the play: “All the visible action takes place before these doorways, in a shabby, cheaply furnished living room lined with well used books, the titles of which are largely those of O’Neill’s acknowledged influences. The family lives in that mid-region between the bright formality of the exterior front parlor—the mask—and the little known dark of the rear room” (E 10). Another feature of the setting that plays a significant part in the play is the chandelier with bulbs in it which are turned off and on in the last act of the play. To help students imagine the living room setting where most of the play takes place, they can discuss the answers to the following questions, and later, write the answers in their journals:
1.
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How many rooms are part of the set?
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2.
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How is the room furnished? With what kind of furniture?
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3.
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Where are the windows located?
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4.
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Where are the double doors located?
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5.
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What is in the background?
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6.
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What is in the foreground?
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7.
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How is the setting lighted?
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8.
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What impression does the opening scene make?
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9.
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What does the description of the setting suggest about the mood and atmosphere of the play?
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Alan B. Howes has given some helpful guidelines for teaching plays which can be modified and adapted for different levels and classes.
1.
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Be selective in teaching the play.
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Some important soliloquies and conversations can be discussed more thoroughly while others can be passed over with less discussion. Moreover, it has been suggested by Tom Whitaker (during the 1983 Drama Seminar) to have the students read the play once, take notes on the characters, plot and action; then read it a second time looking for dialogue and exposition “that confirms, complicates or . . . questions” their first interpretation. Then read it “as an actor who has been assigned a character.”
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2.
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Place important passages or scenes side by side in order to show the development of character and the ironies present. (T 77) For example, the description of the “convent girl” quality of Mary in the first act and later in the same act when the stage directions state that one sees in her face “the girl she had once been.” Then later in Act 1 when Mary shows her bitterness and resentment in her remarks about her unhappiness with her life, her home, and her family which makes her long for her previous, better life at the convent. A further juxtaposition is useful in the final act, when Mary plays the Chopin waltz on the piano; then entering through the doorway with her hair braided, wearing the blue nightgown and carrying her wedding dress. She talks aloud about her life in the convent when she “fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” (L 176) Many biographers who interviewed those who knew or were related to the O’Neill family have stated that the description of Mary Tyrone closely parallels Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill’s mother. The description is significant, revealing the way the playwright pictured his mother: “graceful” figure, a “once pretty face,” “sensitive” lips, “pure” white hair, once “beautiful” hands, “soft” and “attractive” voice, “simple, unaffected” charm.
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3.
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Move beyond the stereotypes in discussing the characters. (T 77) Discuss with students the definition of stereotype—a person or group considered to typify or conform to a standardized concept, lacking any individuality. Continue by explaining that in stereotyping, individual qualities aren’t considered. Point out that people or characters, while they might have some traits of a stereotypical person, don’t have all the traits of a stereotype. The description of all four main characters in this play is so thoroughly made that each aspect of their characterizations should be examined carefully. Although Tyrone may be stingy, Mary may be mentally disturbed, Jamie may be an alcoholic and Edmund sickly and sensitive, these traits do not begin to reveal all the dimensions of the four characters. Their contradictions, complexity and individuality should be discussed, instead, in order to sound the depths of the characters. Stereotyping the characters does not fully interpret their unique plight nor the importance of the tragedy.
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4.
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In helping the students become involved in the play, urge them to move from what happens to why it happens. (T 78) Try to involve them in discussing the different characters’ relationships to each other, for example, the animosity between the father and sons. See how much of the mood changes, themes, characterizations, situation, the students can find in the dialogue themselves. Ask about your students’ perspectives. Encourage them to ask their questions and point out their problems. Then discuss those scenes, characters, or their problems.
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Encourage students to express their feelings as a character in the play, as a director, or as a person in the audience. (T 78, 79) Involve the students completely in the world of the play. Have them realize that the play isn’t a “case history” but a dramatic and artistic creation which should arouse “true sympathy.”
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6.
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Lead students to see the controversy over the various interpretations of the play by reading the reviews and criticism from
The New York Times
, April 29, 1986,
The New Haven Register
, March 27
,
1988
, The Hartford Courant
, March, 1988 and
The New Haven Advocate,
April 25, 1988. Other criticism of the play in periodicals includes:
America,
May 5, 1956,
Life,
November 19, 1956,
New York Times Magazine,
October 21, 1956,
Newsweek,
November 19, 1956 and
Time
, November 19, 1956. For example, Frank Rich in
The New York Times
, April 29, 1986, wrote: In the director, Jonathan Miller’s new production, he makes the author’s rhythm much faster paced by using overlapping dialogue with “. . . some lines shouted down, others trimmed and still others rattled off so quickly that the mother, Mary, persuades us that her morphine addiction produces symptoms often associated with amphetamines.”
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