It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living-room, facing the audience, to the left of the archway. In an old fashioned what-not in the living-room are seen scores of transparent glass animals. Upstage, centre, and divided by a wide arch or second proscenium with transparent faded portières (or second curtain), is the dining-room. Downstage is the living-room, which also serves as a sleeping-room for Laura, the sofa is unfolding to make her bed. At the end of Tom's opening commentary, the dark tenement wall slowly reveals (by means of a transparency) the interior of the ground floor Wingfield apartment. It is up and down these alleys that exterior entrances and exits are made, during the play. This building, which runs parallel to the footlights, is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clothes-lines, garbage cans, and the sinister lattice-work of neighbouring fire-escapes.
At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic. It omits some details others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. The fire-escape is included in the set - that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it. The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.
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