In Thirst, for instance, three people—a female Dancer from a luxury liner, a Gentleman, and a West Indian sailor are adrift and desperately thirsty in shark-infested waters. In these circumstances, the singing and then silence of the West Indian become unbearable to the white characters, who imagine he is hoarding drinking water. After the woman goes insane, performs a grim striptease, and dies, the sailor proposes that the two men eat her to save themselves. All are reduced to primal urges and fears; in quick succession, the Gentleman throws her body overboard, the men fight, and both fall into the sea.

In Fog, two men, a woman, and her dead child are in a lifeboat. With a keen sense of the power of sound on stage, the playwright opens with darkness—they are surrounded by fog—and only the voices of the two men, who themselves can’t see each other or anything else, punctuate the stage. Two worldviews, that of the Businessman and of the Poet, come into conflict in the constricted space of the boat. Forced to deal with other, the Businessman insists on his America First ideology, where immigrants, like the foreign woman, be damned, while the Poet, more sensitive to the sufferings of the poor people in steerage, is a nihilist, unafraid of his own death, even as he helps others. Unlike the sudden violence of Thirst, Fog ends with a rescue, although when the fog lifts, the men discover that the mother has also died in the night. Their survival seems as much an accident as that of the deaths in Thirst, but O’Neill holds out the possibility of opening up the enshrouded world of the boat to another reality, where hope cannot be discounted even in the face of death.

In these first plays, O’Neill experiments with a variety of circumstances and situations, not always successfully. The Movie Man (1914), for instance, is remarkably prescient in anticipating the linkage between the new media and the events that make news. But the situation—two movie newsreel men in Mexico, covering a Pancho Villa-type insurrection—brings out some of O’Neill’s worst writing, including the stage Spanglish spoken by the Mexican characters. In The Sniper, O’Neill again moves out of the world of his personal knowledge, this time to wartime Belgium. He establishes some effective ironies but sacrifices subtlety when Rougon, a Belgian peasant grieving for his son, turns killer, and the Prussian officer, who had earlier expressed some slight sympathy for him, is forced to have him executed quickly. The naturalistic power of what seems from early in the play as inevitable is undercut by the obvious trajectory of the plot. As with Movie Man, O’Neill chooses a setting and situation where complexity of action will be sacrificed to the inevitability of violence.

In later plays, O’Neill would restrict the display of violent acts so frequently shown in his first dramatic pieces. Nevertheless, the playwright indicates that he is willing to explore darker dimensions of social situation and individual consciousness. Not content with the simpleminded assignment of violence to purely evil villains, he finds that ordinary people, caught in war or the slums or trapped in a life raft with no water to drink are likely to act as other than the angels they should be onstage. As he moved into the next phase of his writing, 1916-1918, O’Neill would retain this belief in the human capacity for violence, even if only expressed as language, but would look for demonstrations of it beyond the pistol to the head.

THE MATURING PLAYWRIGHT

ONE-ACT PLAYS

SS Glencairn Series

O’Neill would make use of all of his maritime voyages in his plays, but the four plays gathered as the Glencairn plays are based primarily on his experiences aboard the British steamer SS Ikala in 1911. The order of composition suggests that O’Neill only thought of putting them together later; three years separate the first draft of Bound East for Cardiff (1914) and the three others: In the Zone, The Moon of the Caribbees, and The Long Voyage Home. As with James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the order of events in the Glencairn plays does not match composition; when finally played as a set, Moon was acted first, Bound East next, and In the Zone last. Through all four plays, the one binding character is Driscoll, the Irish stoker. Others enter or reappear, but Driscoll—a hard-living, hard-drinking, dominating but good-hearted, superstitious, and ignorant man—persists in all conditions. He is no hero, though; just a man with the same biases and strengths of other men. The dramatic focus may be pointed to another character—Yank or Smitty or Olson, for instance; still, Driscoll continues as best he can, a limited man in a rough, hauntingly beautiful, often crushing world.

The Moon of the Caribbees

Written in early 1917, The Moon of the Caribbees remained the author’s personal favorite of the Glencairn plays. O’Neill thought The Moon “was my first real break with theatrical traditions,” and “an attempt to achieve a higher plane of bigger, finer values” (Sheaffer Playwright, 383-84). Most commentators have recognized it as a mood-driven rather than plot-driven drama, an attempt to generate interest from a story other than a typical linear one about two or three main characters. As Margaret Ranald remarks, it is “his first truly multicultural play [and it] foreshadows also his interest in ‘total theatre’ ”(Ranald 55). Although its first performance (December 20, 1918) at the Provincetown theater in New York was something of a bust—someone had left the painted scenery outside in the rain—The Moon had better luck in a professional production of all four Glencairn plays in 1924. Although considered dull by its first viewers, The Moon is now recognized as one of O’Neill’s best short plays.

According to Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill based the action of the play on an otherwise undescribed incident while the future playwright was a seaman on board the SS Ikala, anchored a half-mile off the shallow-water harbor of Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1911 (Playwright 187). Here, though, O’Neill is after something other than gritty verisimilitude.