I know, right? The hell of it is that I'm probably the perfect audience for the Eugene O'Neill send-up--I'm a fan who's read a lot of his plays but not seen many. The stage directions for, say, Long Day's Journey Into Night run on for pages, devoting paragraphs to the shape of a character's nose, or to other things that you could never reproduce with real actors. (I find it easy to forgive in that one, because he never necessarily meant it to be produced. It's his memoir, it's OK for it to be novelistic.)
Stage direction from The Emperor Jones:
"Smithers is a tall, stoop-shouldered man about forty. His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam's apple, looks like an egg. The tropics have tanned his naturally pasty face with its small, sharp features to a sickly yellow, and native rum has painted his pointed nose to a startling red. His little, washy-blue eyes are red-rimmed and dart about him like a ferret's. His expression is one of unscrupulous meanness, cowardly and dangerous."
There are eyeballs, I tell you! Eyeballs in the sky!
The book was Caitlin R. Kiernan's From Weird and Distant Shores. And then they let me take it home in exchange for leaving a different book next time. I could live with more of that sort of luck.
no subject
Stage direction from The Emperor Jones:
"Smithers is a tall, stoop-shouldered man about forty. His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam's apple, looks like an egg. The tropics have tanned his naturally pasty face with its small, sharp features to a sickly yellow, and native rum has painted his pointed nose to a startling red. His little, washy-blue eyes are red-rimmed and dart about him like a ferret's. His expression is one of unscrupulous meanness, cowardly and dangerous."
There are eyeballs, I tell you! Eyeballs in the sky!
The book was Caitlin R. Kiernan's From Weird and Distant Shores. And then they let me take it home in exchange for leaving a different book next time. I could live with more of that sort of luck.