Driscoll dreads Yank’s death not only because it leaves him bereft of a friend, but also because it exposes the danger of being on board a ship for long periods. Reality is scraping rust—and falling off ladders—not little farms for old sailors. The only woman who enters the scene is the “pretty lady dressed in black” whom Yank sees at the end. Even the hard-bitten Cocky is chastened. In the compressed world of the forecastle, the sudden appearance of death leaves no escape hatch. “Gawd blimey!” is the only articulated response.

The Long Voyage Home

Although the death of Yank induces “horror” and “awe” in the men, Bound East is not an entirely depressing play. The Long Voyage Home, however, is another matter. Fat Joe’s bar on the London waterfront represents the nadir of such establishments for O’Neill, a place where poor, benighted sailors are exploited and seduced and, at best, left with nothing. Only the solace—the fog—of drink makes their lot bearable. The men claim to be going home, but the playwright forces us to question whether such men as these have any home beyond the forecastle of a tramp steamer.

Fat Joe keeps prostitutes and a “crimp” in his place. Nick’s “job” is to shanghai men for sailing ships—impress them into service against their will. Olson makes an easy mark: with money in his pocket, his service commitment finished, he drinks happily, dreaming of home. Women and whiskey are pleasures impossible for many of the seamen to resist; but what makes this especially poignant is Olson’s brief moment of lucidity, when he hears the name of the ship on which he will unwittingly be put once his pockets are empty. There is no “home” for these sailors—only more voyages on bad ships. Sea life has always been shown to be a tough one in O’Neill’s work; here, though, it turns into absolute futility. Alcohol is the enemy disguised as a friend, desired but stupefying, leaving the men witless, transparently exploitable, forever in bondage to a rotten system. Dreamers like Olson are doomed losers, fools to believe they can return home or recover what they have lost—the farm, mother, an imaginary wife and kids. Mostly, it’s the cynical who persist—they have no illusions about who they are or the morality of what they do.

Written earlier in the year, the play opened on November 2, 1917, and was performed, in Ronald Wainscott’s description, “in a set so horribly executed that it could stand as an exemplar of the worst aspects of some amateur theatre” (Wainscott,“Notable” 98). The play fared better in the 1924 omnibus production of the Glencairn series. Olson was based on a seaman whom O’Neill met on board the SS Ikala in 1911 and about whom he wrote in 1920, “The great sorrow and mistake of his life, he used to grumble, was that as a boy he had left the small paternal farm to run away to sea.” On the Ikala, the seaman would spin a perfect fantasy of farm life right there in the forecastle, then “having got rid of his farm inhibitions for the time being would grin resignedly, and take up his self-appointed burden of making a rope mat for some ‘gel’ in Barracas” (Sheaffer, Playwright 186-87). In the play a Swede, in O’Neill’s remembrance a Norwegian, the original was probably Danish, as if Nordic nationality were interchangeable. Regardless, the playwright suggests that the Irish stoker, Driscoll, will never be conned as easily as Olson. The most important character across the four Glencairn plays, Driscoll drinks hard, demands his Irish whiskey, and at the end is oblivious to Olson’s fate. But he’s still standing; earlier in the play he also had the ability to put down his glass and carry off his drunken shipmate, Ivan, before the latter turned worse. That’s still only a small consolation in the desolate landscape of forecastle society, but it is all that O’Neill will let us have.

In the Zone

Another of O’Neill’s early 1917 plays, In the Zone is unique among the Glencairn series in that it is set in wartime. Although O’Neill was as physically distant from World War I as he was from the Pancho Villa actions in Mexico, his use of a familiar setting, the tramp steamer, and a psychological approach to war make In the Zone a more compelling drama than The Movie Man or The Sniper. Louis Sheaffer surmises that the drama is based in part on a 1912 episode familiar to the playwright when he was a reporter for the New London Telegraph; a box discovered in an Italian grocery, thought to contain something deadly, was found to have only clothes (Playwright 381-82). Converted into a story about wartime paranoia, In the Zone was given a strong presentation by the Washington Square Players on October 31, 1917—in wartime—and soon became part of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, touring for thirty-four weeks. That latter development provided O’Neill with his first steady income from his craft, enabling him to marry Agnes Boulton and reduce the chronic worry about finances.

O’Neill, once arrested himself on Cape Cod as a suspected German spy, again focuses on his sensitive young man among the roughs. Smitty, whose anxieties come close to being exposed in Moon, appears this time as a man with a secret the others feel they need to know.