They have entered a war zone—the time is 1915—and with that comes heightened vigilance. Smitty has always been different. Based on an alcoholic son of a nobleman whom O’Neill met in a bar in Buenos Aires called the Sailor’s Opera, Smitty has the education and complex personality that put him at odds with his simpler, louder, more superstitious shipmates. As a consequence, his black box becomes an object of suspicion, standing for the man who has never quite fit in and does not reveal his secrets.

As with the nineteenth-century plays O’Neill watched as a boy, a telltale artifact reveals the truth. It is also another instance in O’Neill (Wife for a Life is the first such) in which a woman speaks but is not seen. Edith’s personal letters to “Sidney Davidson,” read through the medium of Driscoll, become a public spectacle when the men suspect Smitty of being a German spy. Her letters are quoted—and like the lady in black that Yank thinks he sees in Bound East, the physically absent Edith, through her devastating words, becomes a figure who shatters illusion as surely as death. Smitty’s urban life, his alcoholism, his failed romance, all become grist for the forecastle mill. But as with Bound, the sight of a man in private agony is too much for the others. In their shame and odd sympathy, they find the slaughter of a shipmate’s dignity “in the zone” leaves them all wounded.

Ile

Written at the same time as Moon, Zone, and Voyage, Ile marks O’Neill’s departure from the Glencairn but not from the sea. During his time in Provincetown, he no doubt heard stories of residents there, including Captain John Cook and his wife Viola. Cook, a whaling captain who was rumored once to have killed a mutineer, had taken his wife along on at least one voyage. The experience damaged her psyche and her relation with her husband; afterward, she became known as a frightening figure to local children, someone who sang hymns at odd times and sharpened the kitchen knives as if they were to be murder weapons. Captain Cook, while home, kept his bedroom door locked at night (Sheaffer, Playwright 384-85).

That radical estrangement informs the text of Ile. Keeney’s monomania, like Captain Ahab’s, divorces him from his men and his wife. Although the setting, a whaler, and the date of the action, 1895, puts the immediate circumstances of the play out of O’Neill’s personal experience, commentators have seen much of the private in this play. Readers familiar with Long Day’s Journey into Night quickly connect Annie Keeney’s mad scene at the end with Mary Tyrone’s; by extension, then, given the proximity of Long Day’s Journey to O’Neill biography, Annie represents an early version of the playwright’s use of his mother, Ella, as a haunted figure in his drama. Stephen Black, following Sheaffer, suggests further that Keeney stands for James O’Neill and that Ile is a statement about “alienation” from a wandering father who dragged his wife hither and yon. If that is so, then there is some irony in an episode from January 1920. James O’Neill, then dying and attended by his playwright son, was entertained by George Tyler and Will Connor, who staged a debate about whether Ile or The Rope was the “best one-act play ever written” (O’Neill to Agnes Boulton, January 14, 1920, in King 64). The son’s success was a source of pride to the father, not evidence of James’s failings.

The play opened on November 30, 1917, at the Provincetown in New York, with Nina Moise directing. It seems appropriate that a woman should have directed Ile; heretofore, women in O’Neill’s nautical dramas have been either absent entirely, spoken only through signs, or been taken largely as sexual objects, but in Ile, Annie, like Smitty in the Glencairn plays, absorbs more of the human interest than the blustering males in the world of ships. There seems to be a strong dose of Glaspell’s Trifles in Annie’s plea to her husband: “Oh, I want to be home in the old house once more and see my own kitchen again, and hear a woman’s voice talking to me and be able to talk to her.” Unlike the real-life Viola Cook and Glaspell’s Mary Wright, however, Annie does not turn her frustration into murderous thoughts. Instead, as Jean Chothia notes, Annie’s revenge, if one wants to use that word, comes in the way she excludes her husband from access to her private being (Chothia, “Trying” 194). There may be something wild in her playing the organ, signs of an Ophelia-like madness (Pfister 204), but it comes from the frozen wasteland of passion thwarted. As such, it is her final protest, as Egil Törnqvist rightly describes, “against the brutal, implacable silence of the universe” (182)—and against the patriarchal will, inarticulate but unmoveable.

Where the Cross Is Made

Written sometime in early fall 1918 and based on an unpublished short story by Agnes Boulton, “The Captain’s Walk,” Where the Cross Is Made moved quickly into production, directed by Ida Rauh and presented by the Provincetowners on November 22, 1918 (Black 224). Although O’Neill seemed pleased with it at the time, it rapidly fell in importance in his own eyes as well as the eyes of others. He tried a full-length version in Gold (1920), but not even that treatment could really save the play. As with nearly all his longer plays through 1920, Gold was abandoned by O’Neill when it came time to collect a set of his full-length work in 1932. If Gold shows its flaws rather easily, Where the Cross Is Made can more readily be viewed through the playwright’s intention.