So bad did this effort seem to O’Neill himself later, that he presumed he had destroyed it—in fact, he had had it copyrighted—and would not even dignify it with the word “play.”

Nevertheless, O’Neill set off in directions that will reappear in the plays in this volume. The world of Wife for a Life is a homosocial one, where women are referred to by men or speak only at a remove (the telegram). Because O’Neill himself had done mining, he makes use of direct personal experience in the setting. As someone who had married, then left a wife to go adventuring, he may also have written something of himself into the Older Man. The plot moves toward violence and is saved from it only by the Older Man’s ability to see Jack’s innocence and recognize his own bitterness. And Jack as an idealist who seeks a better world through the force of his desires and dreams is only the first of many such figures to populate O’Neill plays.

True enough, if this had been O’Neill’s only play, it would barely rate a footnote in historical surveys of drama. The moral is crude, the coincidences the type that were already stock, and one of the characters, Old Pete, a mere plot device. Even so, A Wife for a Life smolders with barely expressed resentments. Unlike its forebears on the stage of O’Neill’s father, this skit reveals darker, more inchoate motivations for action. The Older Man is no villain, but a drifter who still harbors some unrealizable hope for his own redemption. In a portrayal O’Neill would struggle with his whole career, the woman is more symbol than being, a bodiless voice in this case, a name given to a gold mine, a divisive force between two male friends—not someone with autonomy or integrity.

His other plays from 1913-1915 suffer from some of the same ills, but also show O’Neill pulling away from melodramatic technique if not altogether from sensationalism. Suicide, murder, or disease appear frequently, providing abrupt if ruthlessly logical endings to his mostly one-act dramas. The Web was the effort the author acknowledged as his first “play.” Appropriately, the main character, the prostitute Rose, has tuberculosis. Throughout the play, she coughs (the play was originally entitled “The Cough”), a technique that will appear later, but the sort of device that would not normally have appeared on a stage that was reluctant to offend its audience with too-close an approximation to the reality of sickness and poverty. In addition, her child is hungry, her pimp brutal, her circumstances cause for despair. A safecracker, Tim Moran, offers to help her get a start on a new life, but he’s gunned down by the pimp, and Rose, with her baby taken by the police, is arrested for Tim’s murder. The grimness of it all is naturalism, the literary depiction of pathetic individuals wincing under the cruel blows of an uncaring universe. As Rose cries to the air, “Gawd! Gawd! Why d’yuh hate me so?” (CP 1:28), an audience may be left to wonder the same thing. One of the differences, then, between his first skit and this play is the introduction of philosophical issues to the depiction of human struggles. Not content merely to entertain his fellow inmates of hospital Earth, O’Neill saw that drama must do more: boil life down to its essential agonies, then have his characters make of them the best that they can. In that sense, the author was working more in the tradition of the writers of Job than of Monte Cristo.

In these and other O’Neill plays, the choking by circumstance mirrors the gasping for breath by tuberculosis, with both given force by the inexorability extracted from a naturalistic vision of life. Some of this vision came from such plays as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or Strindberg’s Miss Julie, as in the short play Recklessness (1913). But much of the energy behind O’Neill’s naturalism seems to have its origins in novels and stories by American prose writers, notably Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London. In their works, the playwright could find stories unlike those on the stage of his day, the struggles and failings of working stiffs, the uneducated, the beguiled, the animalistic men, and sometimes women, who made up huge segments of the population but who rarely got anything except comic treatment in the theater. To name just one example, Norris’s novel McTeague (1899) chronicles a would-be dentist whose mechanic’s approach to his job and limited ability to understand his circumstances leave him helpless to avoid the forces that push him toward brutish behavior, murder, greed, and his own grim death. The confinement of McTeague’s marriage and apartment, his ultimate entrapment in a world of No Exit, as Jean-Paul Sartre would later imagine, might have given to O’Neill a vocabulary of situation with which to challenge the limited range of dramatic narratives being used by early twentieth-century playwrights.

Another classic work of literary naturalism is Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” the largely true-life story of that author’s experience in a lifeboat. The universe Crane depicts is not actively hostile but instead is indifferent to the outcome of the four men’s attempt to beach their craft safely. To some extent, O’Neill’s response to the claustrophobia of life in a closed room is also the open boat, under the broad skies, but even there, too, a sense of enclosure often suffocates its victims. In one-act plays such as Thirst and Fog, life rafts provide a sort of “microcosm,” as Margaret Loftus Ranald notes (52), where life on the wide sea turns inward or desperate. If the hospital or sick room lies behind O’Neill’s early depictions of enclosed space, the forecastle of a ship may be the template, even for drifting rafts.