Scene work and monologues for theater students

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Long Day's Journey Into Night

(Here, Edmund, suffering from tuberculosis - walks alone on the beach following an argument with his father and expresses his anger and bitterness.)
EDMUND: To hell with sense! We're all crazy! What do we want with sense? (He quotes, sardonically, from Dowson.)
"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream."
The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded so unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. (He sees his father staring at him with mingled worry and irritated disapproval. He grins mockingly.) Don't look at me as if I'd gone nutty. I'm talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die - that is, inside you - and you have to go on living as a ghost.

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