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Scene Study prepares you to perform key scenes for your theater class or audition. We've got all the information you need for a great performance.

Excerpt from Scene 2 Dialogue: Aunt and Mildred

 

MILDRED

[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome. [She closes her eyes.]

AUNT

[With a bitter laugh.] Merci for your candor...

Read the full dialogue.
 

 

Understanding the Given Circumstances

  • This scene takes place on the “promenade deck” of a luxury ocean liner, crossing from New York to London in the early 1920s.
  • Mildred, a young woman of 20, travels with her aunt. At that time, it was common to protect the “virtue” of wealthy young women by assigning a chaperone, stereotypically an older, unmarried woman with a strict, prudish sensibility. Mildred’s aunt is meant to evoke the caricature of a wealthy, self-important aristocrat who looks down on the less fortunate.
  • Mildred is taking a trip abroad to do service projects with those less fortunate. Mildred’s aunt perceives Mildred’s behavior as “slumming” and considers it scandalous.
  • Both Mildred and her aunt are wealthy, but Mildred is the daughter of the owner of Nazareth Steel, which puts her family in a class by itself.

 

Blocking and Movement

In theater, blocking is the process of planning the actors’ physical movements and positions. Be sure to show respect and establish trust when working with scene partners. As you prepare to block this scene, ask yourself the following questions:

  • The playwright is very specific about movement in this scene. How might these stage directions inform each character’s motivation? Are there moments in which the playwright has not specified movement but movements could clarify the scene? Is there room in the stage directions for interpretation?
  • In the beginning, Mildred and her aunt are reclining on deck chairs. How does each woman recline?
  • O’Neill indicates that the impression of the scene should be two artificial figures amid vibrant life and natural energy. How do the characters’ movements indicate this contrast, and how can the power of the ocean and sea air be conveyed?
  • Mildred has asked to go below deck to see the workers who are responsible for the operation of the ship. Her first line references the smoke coming from the stokehole, which is where she will eventually go. How conscious is she of the layout of the ship? How does that inform her focus? For example, are there moments in the scene where Mildred looks for the men who will escort her down?

 

Character Relationships

  • What kind of relationship do Mildred and her aunt seem to have with each other?
  • What is the power dynamic between the two characters? Does one have more status than the other? Does that status change over the course of the dialogue?
  • Do the characters mean what they say when they talk to each other? Are they sarcastic? Ironic? Hurt? Caring?
  • How does the way that Mildred and her Aunt talk to each other inform the audience’s sympathies?
  • Is one character meant to be seen as “good” and one character “bad”? If so, which is which? Does that change over the course of the scene? Is the audience meant to have empathy for either Mildred or her aunt?

 

Historical Context

  • O’Neill wrote this play in the early 1920s, in the years immediately following World War I and revolutions in Ireland and Russia.
  • “Nazareth Steel” is an oblique reference to Bethlehem Steel, one of the most important corporations in the history of the United States. The products manufactured there formed the basis of warships, bridges, and buildings for most of the twentieth century. Mildred, therefore, is a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world.
  • In the scene, Mildred refers to the Bessemer process, which relates to the manufacturing of steel. She compares herself to waste at the end of this process, a reference to her own lack of agency in her father’s corporation.
  • Mildred’s aunt refers contemptuously to Mildred’s work on the East Side of New York. She specifically means the Lower East Side, where immigrants lived in squalor in tenements. Reformers were interested in obtaining health and other services for these people, and they engaged wealthy donors and volunteers like Mildred to help.
  • Mildred wants to know “how the other half lives,” which refers to the title of a book by reformer Jacob Riis, who studied poverty in New York.
  • The way that Mildred and her aunt speak to each other reflects their social status. It is more proper and stilted language than is used in the rest of the play, which mainly focuses on working-class characters speaking in dialect.
  • Whitechapel, the location that Mildred intends to visit in London and that horrifies her aunt, was synonymous with poverty and the subject of another book by author Jack London: The People of the Abyss.

 

Full Scene 2 Dialogue: Aunt and Mildred

 

Scene—Two days out. A section of the promenade deck. MILDRED DOUGLAS and her aunt are discovered reclining in deck chairs. The former is a girl of twenty, slender, delicate, with a pale, pretty face marred by a self-conscious expression of disdainful superiority. She looks fretful, nervous and discontented, bored by her own anemia. Her aunt is a pompous and proud—and fat—old lady. She is a type even to the point of a double chin and lorgnettes. She is dressed pretentiously, as if afraid her face alone would never indicate her position in life. MILDRED is dressed all in white.

The impression to be conveyed by this scene is one of the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about—sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it. 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.

MILDRED

[Looking up with affected dreaminess.] How the black smoke swirls back against the sky! Is it not beautiful?

AUNT

[Without looking up.] I dislike smoke of any kind.

MILDRED

My great-grandmother smoked a pipe—a clay pipe.

AUNT

[Ruffling.] Vulgar!

MILDRED

She was too distant a relative to be vulgar. Time mellows pipes.

AUNT

[Pretending boredom but irritated.] Did the sociology you took up at college teach you that—to play the ghoul on every possible occasion, excavating old bones? Why not let your great-grandmother rest in her grave?

MILDRED

[Dreamily.] With her pipe beside her—puffing in Paradise.

AUNT

[With spite.] Yes, you are a natural born ghoul. You are even getting to look like one, my dear.

MILDRED

[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome. [She closes her eyes.]

AUNT

[With a bitter laugh.] Merci for your candor. But since I am and must be your chaperone—in appearance, at least—let us patch up some sort of armed truce. For my part you are quite free to indulge any pose of eccentricity that beguiles you—as long as you observe the amenities—

MILDRED

[Drawling.] The inanities?

AUNT

[Going on as if she hadn’t heard.] After exhausting the morbid thrills of social service work on New York’s East Side—how they must have hated you, by the way, the poor that you made so much poorer in their own eyes!—you are now bent on making your slumming international. Well, I hope Whitechapel will provide the needed nerve tonic. Do not ask me to chaperone you there, however. I told your father I would not. I loathe deformity. We will hire an army of detectives and you may investigate everything—they allow you to see.

MILDRED

[Protesting with a trace of genuine earnestness.] Please do not mock at my attempts to discover how the other half lives. Give me credit for some sort of groping sincerity in that at least. I would like to help them. I would like to be some use in the world. Is it my fault I don’t know how? I would like to be sincere, to touch life somewhere. [With weary bitterness.] But I’m afraid I have neither the vitality nor integrity. All that was burnt out in our stock before I was born. Grandfather’s blast furnaces, flaming to the sky, melting steel, making millions—then father keeping those home fires burning, making more millions—and little me at the tail-end of it all. I’m a waste product in the Bessemer process—like the millions. Or rather, I inherit the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and darned by it, as they say at the race track—damned in more ways than one, [She laughs mirthlessly].

AUNT

[Unimpressed—superciliously.] You seem to be going in for sincerity to-day. It isn’t becoming to you, really—except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There’s a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.

MILDRED

[Again affected and bored.] Yes, I suppose I do. Pardon me for my outburst. When a leopard complains of its spots, it must sound rather grotesque. [In a mocking tone.] Purr, little leopard. Purr, scratch, tear, kill, gorge yourself and be happy—only stay in the jungle where your spots are camouflage. In a cage they make you conspicuous.

AUNT

I don’t know what you are talking about.

MILDRED

It would be rude to talk about anything to you. Let’s just talk. [She looks at her wrist watch.] Well, thank goodness, it’s about time for them to come for me. That ought to give me a new thrill, Aunt.

AUNT

[Affectedly troubled.] You don’t mean to say you’re really going? The dirt—the heat must be frightful—

MILDRED

Grandfather started as a puddler. I should have inherited an immunity to heat that would make a salamander shiver. It will be fun to put it to the test.

AUNT

But don’t you have to have the captain’s—or someone’s—permission to visit the stokehole?

MILDRED

[With a triumphant smile.] I have it—both his and the chief engineer’s. Oh, they didn’t want to at first, in spite of my social service credentials. They didn’t seem a bit anxious that I should investigate how the other half lives and works on a ship. So I had to tell them that my father, the president of Nazareth Steel, chairman of the board of directors of this line, had told me it would be all right.

AUNT

He didn’t.

MILDRED

How naive age makes one! But I said he did, Aunt. I even said he had given me a letter to them—which I had lost. And they were afraid to take the chance that I might be lying. [Excitedly.] So it’s ho! for the stokehole. The second engineer is to escort me. [Looking at her watch again.] It’s time. And here he comes, I think.

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