In contrast to the earlier written Bound East for Cardiff, the motif of the enclosed forecastle is muted; most of the men sit on the hatch, outside in the full moon, listening to the singing of West Indians on shore. One level of action deals with the pent-up emotions of men eager for release. As the sounds of the men drinking and cavorting with the women grow louder and effectively drown out the “melancholy,” and perhaps funereal, music, the otherwise unobserved forecastle seems like a subconscious from which demons violently erupt. The libido is in full gear; when Bella, a voice of socially conscious reason, tries to stop their riot, Driscoll grabs her to force her to dance. Once opened and emptied, the forecastle will not reclaim its demons until blood has been spilled.

At the other end of the psychological spectrum are the two quiet ones, Smitty and Tom (“Donk”) the donkeyman (steam engine operator). Donk cannot drink, under doctor’s orders, but he is untroubled by the past. Smitty, by contrast, an Englishman of somewhat higher class background than the others, finds that the music brings up “beastly memories” that haunt him. Unlike the other men who can put aside their racism at the prospect of pleasure, Smitty recoils in disgust at Pearl. Even after the chaos on deck, he seems untouched by what’s immediately around him. Instead, he reacts more powerfully to his own personal demons than to the chastened demons of the forecastle. The price of articulation—Smitty is a “gentleman”—is self-censorship and lingering internal strife.

For O’Neill, the evocative setting of the moon, the island, and the quiet sea highlights Smitty’s self-conscious pose as the intellectual in despair: “[H]is silhouetted gestures of self-pity,” he wrote to Barrett Clark, “are reduced to their proper insignificance” (Sheaffer, Playwright 384). In other words, Smitty’s own sense of gloom should not be taken as the message of the play. As Stephen Black summarizes, “Beauty and truth were manifest in the sea. . . . [H]umanity is simply part of the picture.” Therefore, he continues, the play is “neither pessimistic nor optimistic” (200). This view suggests that O’Neill has moved away from his hostile universe of The Web and other early works and closer to Crane’s “The Open Boat,” but even there he goes a step further: It is the very mystery of the sea’s beauty rather than its flat grayness, as Crane describes it, that exacerbates Smitty’s feelings of alienation.

Bound East for Cardiff

The most famous of O’Neill’s one-act plays, Bound East for Cardiff, is also the only play of his from before 1916 that has had more than occasional stage life beyond the decade in which it was written. Bound East, originally titled “Children of the Sea,” was written in spring 1914 and copyrighted on May 14 of that year. Its fame rests largely on the fact that it is the first O’Neill play to be performed by an acting company, the Provincetown Players at the wharf theater on Cape Cod. Most accounts of this key moment in American theatrical history include Susan Glaspell’s 1927 remark about hearing the actor Frederick Burt read the script to the company: “Then we knew what we were for” (Sheaffer, Playwright 347). When Bound East premiered on July 28, 1916, with himself in the cast, O’Neill’s career as a public playwright was launched.

Whatever its relative worth or predictive value, Bound East packs a lot into a short space. Set entirely in the cramped forecastle, the play emphasizes the fears and awe of the men in the presence of a dying, then dead comrade. In this homosocial world, domestic life is strangely recreated, brought on by an event all of them hope to avoid. Driscoll, the powerful Irishman stoker, becomes nursemaid to Yank, while the others do their best to go about their business. The two have been together for five years; they have fought, seen dirty movies in Argentina, and drifted together in a lifeboat, with Yank saving Driscoll from drowning himself. Now, the stage Irish in Driscoll wants to sentimentalize the moment, lie to Yank about his imminent recovery—but Yank rejects all such attempts: “What’re yuh all lyin’ for?” he asks. Later, however, Yank brings up his own fantasy of a farm, one he would share with Driscoll, a happy, cozy pair, no doubt, to paraphrase Ishmael’s characterization of his time in bed with Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Indeed, this imagined rural utopia for two anticipates a similar fantasy in another prose naturalist’s work, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), a novel that was successfully adapted for the stage.

Whereas in many of O’Neill’s plays from 1913-1915 endings come abruptly with violence, Bound East leaves its violence offstage. Instead, it is the more basic act of dying that draws attention.