Long Day's Journey Into Night

My first teaching job was as a long term sub, meaning I was substitute for a teacher who would be out for an extended period of time. The position was as the theater teacher. Now there were many glaring problems with this:

First, my theater experience, beyond childhood Christmas plays at church, was once working stage crew on a high school musical and an introduction to acting course, with a course difficulty in the vein of basket-weaving, I took solely to fulfill a creative arts requirement.

Second, acting classes weren't really within my comfort zone. Sure, I had studied to be a teacher and in theory should be able to walk into any classroom and mold young minds, but teaching theater takes more than a class roster and a lesson plan. It takes someone with acting talent, something I lack, and thus I was not equipped to lead by example in the finer points of acting.

Third, I was hired a week before the start of school. There were no textbooks. No materials. The teacher I was a sub for created the course from scratch. She was an acting coach in her spare time,making her a walking textbook. Where as I didn't know my stage right from my stage left.

My greatest performance may have been acting like I knew what I was doing each period. Too many times I was deciding what to do in class as students were walking in the door. Needless to say if any of those kids become movie stars they should receive an instant Oscar just for overcoming the huge setback that was my instruction.

So while I'll never direct a play I enjoy reading them. They're often a welcomed break from novels where the author feels the need to describe everything in unimaginative detail. Plays, even ones written by the the most detail oriented writers, are concise, the meat of the story with all the side dishes intended to be served once it reaches the stage.

I read a lot of Eugene O'Neill's plays in college. I can't say I'm a huge fan of his, but what drew me to his supposed masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night, was the topic of dangerous drugs, like heroin, once being used for common cures. It's beyond frighting that drugs that would now get you jail time used to be given to children to help them sleep. Although I sure for some of my theater students a similar remedy would have been a welcome relief from the pain I put them through.