"Chair (optional)" and other stuff you don't want in your stage directions

When I was reading submitted plays for Element, one of the major indicators of whether a play was going to be good or not caught me completely by surprise. On an intellectual level, I think we all know that stage directions and scene-setting notes need to be good (or at least not bad), but when they're the first information I have about a stranger's play, they take on an unbelievable importance. They reveal a lot about your priorities as a writer -- are you trying to design your play instead of writing it? do you not know what detail is extraneous to your story? -- in addition to your ability to string words together. Here are some traps I've been seeing people fall into (all examples paraphrased or made up, unless noted):

1. Death by generic-ass description.

Something like: The room is a typical college dorm room. It has two beds (one upstage left, the other upstage right), two chairs (one next to the desk, the other behind the other desk), two desks, a pile of socks on the end of the bed, lamps on top of the desks... About three list items ago, I fell asleep. If the college is a typical dorm room, I can picture it. Don't tell me what's obvious about that setup, tell me what's unique about the way the characters shape their environment:

A typical college dorm room, except for the fact that Alyssa has a pinup-style cartoon of Einstein above her bed.

It would be a typical college dorm room if it weren't for the corpse under the bed, one arm sticking out.

A typical college dorm room. So typical that it looks like it was designed by someone who's only seen movies about college and never been to one.

You get the idea. Use that space to be specific and get a head start on your story and characters. Anything that isn't doing that is wasting my time and making me dislike you.

2. GPS stage directions.

Something like: Upstage right, there is a balcony connected to the dining room by a spiral staircase with 24 steps; downstage left, a rug is perpendicular to the back wall; the dining-room table is a foot from the doorway... (reader dies from self-inflicted wounds)

You don't know where your play is going to be performed or what the limitations of that space are. Unless it is absolutely essential to an understanding of your story, do not put in this level of detail about the floor plan of the rooms where your play is set. Most published plays that include this level of detail (like, say, The Glass Menagerie) had it added during the publishing process to describe the sets in the original production. The major exception to this is Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is set in Eugene O'Neill's actual house and is described within an inch of its life because it's autobiography so thick and intimate you're practically up the Tyrones' noses.

Also: if you're using work like Glass Menagerie and Long Day's Journey as your references for play structure, you are doing it wrong. Read some plays written after 2000. That's a rant for another day, though.

In The Clean House, Sarah Ruhl gives us a brief but evocative note about where things are in relation to each other:

The white living room has become a hospital.
Or the idea of a hospital.
There is a balcony above the white living room.

That's it. That's what we know at the beginning of Act 2.

3. (optional)

LITERALLY: A chair (optional)... (Reader tears off clothes, runs shrieking into the night)

Why would you do this? This is insane. Don't make something as unbelievably boring as a chair optional; that's the point where you're stepping on the designer's toes and I start to wonder if you play well with others. A production is a collaborative process.

There's a difference between offering suggestions to actors or designers and just writing (optional) next to your nouns; a suggestion that enriches your play is one that gives us new information even if it is not used. Another example from The Clean House:

He does surgery on Ana.
It is an act of love.
If the actor who plays Charles is a good singer,
it would be nice if he could sing
an ethereal medieval love song in Latin
about being medically cured by love
as he does the surgery.

Maybe the actor who plays Charles isn't a good singer, so there won't be singing. But we've learned a ton about the tone of this particular scene. This is a place where pain and the coldness of technology and the fear of death and the dehumanized relationship between doctors and patients -- often seen in depictions of surgery -- are gone. We understand a lot about Charles. We begin to guess a lot about Ana. This is going to have a huge effect on the director and actors as they start work on the play.