DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS
A Play in Three Parts
By
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
Revised Second Edition, as published by Boni & Liveright, 1925
Characters:
EPHRAIM CABOT ---the father
SIMEON, PETER, EBEN--his sons
ABBIE PUTNAM
Young Girl, Two Farmers, The Fiddler, A Sheriff, and other folk from the neighboring farms
The action of the entire play takes place in, and immediately outside of, the Cabot farmhouse in New England, in the year 1850. The south end of the house faces front to a stone wall with a wooden gate at center opening on a country road. The house is in good condition but in need of paint. Its walls are a sickly grayish, the green of the shutters faded. Two enormous elms are on each side of the house. They bend their trailing branches down over the roof. They appear to protect and at the same time subdue. There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption. They have developed from their intimate contact with the life of man in the house an appalling humaneness. They brood oppressively over the house. They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles.
There is a path running from the gate around the right corner of the house to the front door. A narrow porch is on this side. The end wall facing us has two windows in its upper story, two larger ones on the floor below. The two upper are those of the father's bedroom and that of the brothers. On the left, ground floor, is the kitchen--on the right, the parlor, th
e shades of which are always drawn down.
PART I
SCENE ONE
Exterior of the Farmhouse. It is sunset of a day at the beginning of summer in the year 1850. There is no wind and everything is still. The sky above the roof is suffused with deep colors, the green of the elms glows, but the house is in shadow, seeming pale and washed out by contrast.
A door opens and Eben Cabot comes to the end of the porch and stands looking down the road to the right. He has a large bell in his hand and this he swings mechanically, awakening a deafening clangor. Then he puts his hands on his hips and stares up at the sky. He sighs with a puzzled awe and blurts out with halting appreciation.
EBEN--God! Purty! (His eyes fall and he stares about him frowningly. He is twenty-five, tall and sinewy. His face is well-formed, good-looking, but its expression is resentful and d
efensive. His defiant, dark eyes remind one of a wild animal's in captivity. Each day is a cage in which he finds himself trapped but inwardly unsubdued. There is a fierce repressed vitality about him. He has black hair, mustache, a thin curly trace of beard. He is dressed in rough farm clothes. He spits on the ground with intense disgust, turns and goes back into the house. Simeon and Peter come in from their work in the fields. They are tall men, much older than their half-brother [Simeon is thirty-nine and Peter thirty-seven], built on a squarer, simpler model, fleshier in body, more bovine and homelier in face, shrewder and more practical. Their shoulders stoop a bit from years of farm work. They clump heavily along in their clumsy thick-soled boots caked with earth. Their clothes, their faces, hands, bare arms and throats are earth-stained. They smell of earth. They stand together for a moment in front of the house and, as if with the one impulse, stare dumbly up at the sky, leaning on their hoes. Their faces have a compressed, unresigned expression. As they look upward, this softens.)
SIMEON--(grudgingly) Purty.
PETER--Ay-eh.
SIMEON--(suddenly) Eighteen years ago.
PETER--What?
SIMEON--Jenn. My woman. She died.
PETER--I'd fergot.
SIMEON--I rec'lect--now an' agin. Makes it lonesome. She'd hair long's a hoss' tail--an' yaller like gold!
PETER--Waal--she's gone. (this with indifferent finality--then after a pause) They's gold in the West, Sim.
SIMEON--(still under the influence of sunset--vaguely) In the sky?
PETER--Waal--in a manner o' speakin'--thar's the promise. (growing excited) Gold in the sky--in the West--Golden Gate--Californi-a!--Goldest West!--fields o' gold!
SIMEON--(excited in his turn) Fortunes layin' just atop o' the ground waitin' t' be picked! Solomon's mines, they says! (For a moment they continue looking up at the sky--then their eyes drop.)
PETER--(with sardonic bitterness) Here--it's stones atop o' the ground--stones atop o' stones--makin' stone walls--year atop o' year--him 'n' yew 'n' me 'n' then Eben--makin' stone walls fur him to fence us in!
SIMEON--We've wuked. Give our strength. Give our years. Plowed 'em under in the ground--(he stamps rebelliously)--rottin'--makin' soil for his crops! (a pause) Waal--the farm pays good for hereabouts.
PETER--If we plowed in Californi-a, they'd be lumps o' gold in the furrow!
SIMEON--Californi-a's t'other side o' earth, a'most. We got t' calc'late--
PETER--(after a pause) 'Twould be hard fur me, too, to give up what we've 'arned here by our sweat. (A pause. Eben sticks his head out of the dining-room window, listening.)
SIMEON--Ay-eh. (a pause) Mebbe--he'll die soon.
PETER--(doubtfully) Mebbe.
SIMEON--Mebbe--fur all we knows--he's dead now.
PETER--Ye'd need proof.
SIMEON--He's been gone two months--with no word.
PETER--Left us in the fields an evenin' like this. Hitched up an' druv off into the West. That's plumb onnateral. He hain't never been off this farm 'ceptin' t' the village in thirty year or more, not since he married Eben's maw. (A pause. Shrewdly) I calc'late we might git him declared crazy by the court.
>vaguely

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