This tale of a mad retired captain, his adult children, and a set of ghosts seems pulled from the nineteenth-century stage, but O’Neill imagined that he was creating an experiment whereby the audience could be brought into the madness suggested by the haunting. “It was great fun to write,” he told George Jean Nathan, “theatrically very thrilling, an amusing experiment in treating the audience as insane—that is all it means or ever meant to me” (Sheaffer, Playwright 443).

Theatrically, this use of ghosts hardly seems tenable in a stage world being reshaped by such plays as Bound East for Cardiff. Yet O’Neill understood that madness is not always an isolated individual’s peculiar situation but something that can affect, even transform others. Behind this lies Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play about a monarch deserted by all but his most loyal daughter, Cordelia. Lear protests to the elements and strips down to naked manhood before the forces, including other family members, arrayed against him; yet even in his aloneness, Lear ironically defines the world around him in its attempts to bring him at bay. Bartlett does not obviously have Lear’s stature, but the dynamic in the play is a complex of the captain’s personal psychology—guilt over crimes committed in the treasure hunting coincidental with lust for lucre—and family domestic politics that are affected by one individual’s madness. In other ways, the situation resembles Norris’s McTeague, when the dentist fixes on his wife’s gold coins and cannot imagine himself without them. With Bartlett’s wife dead, the one clear-eyed character, Sue, is no match for her father and her brother, once the gold fever takes hold.

Sue’s loyalty and rationality keep her removed from the treasure story, but Nat swings wildly from pole to pole. Like Eugene O’Neill himself, who both rejected his father and his famous parent’s theatrical milieu at the same time as he sought James’s approval, Nat wants the old man out of the way, then suddenly takes up his mad cause. It is surely no accident that the father’s obsession with ill-gotten treasure mirrors James O’Neill’s own wealth generated from a play about a character fixated on treasure, Monte Cristo. Did Eugene himself fear that he would fall under his father’s spell and sell out his art for the hope of commercial success? Oddly enough, this play comes closer to pandering to popular effects than many of his others from this period; it is almost as if once turning to the issue of ambivalent son and doddering but once domineering father, O’Neill found himself in a trap from which he could not extricate himself. Killing the father but then maddening the son seemed to him the only way out, at a time when O’Neill’s father still lived and the son was feeling quite sane.

This doesn’t mean that the play is only or even primarily autobiography. As Törnqvist notes, for instance, Where the Cross is filled with interesting lighting directions as ways of suggesting psychological states (86-88). He adds that having an unobserving observer (Sue) mitigates the mass effects suggested by the lights or at least makes their effectiveness problematic; even so, “the green glow” that Nat begins to see near the end “seems to signify Captain Bartlett’s idée fixe” (87). More importantly, the use of ghosts, throwback though it is, obviously meant a great deal to the playwright for this particular drama. When others tried to dissuade him from using them in the small space of the Provincetown theater, he insisted they remain. For O’Neill, family dramas are filled with ghosts. In Long Day’s Journey he will use the ghost motif more effectively by having Mary Tyrone come into the room holding her wedding dress, the shade of her former self, but even here, the Banquolike projections of Bartlett’s obsession attempt to give reality to the inner demons of a character more talked about than talking. As an experiment, Where the Cross curiously mixes the modern interest in psychology with styles of dramatic presentation from the melodramatic era; that it is not entirely successful does not lessen the insights we gain into O’Neill’s dramaturgical practice through such transparent devices as green light and ghosts. In addition, as a play about the search for metaphoric treasure, Where the Cross captures an essential problem of the artist in a mass culture devoted to attaining wealth: how literal is the gold one seeks and where is it to be found?

The Rope

As with Where the Cross Is Made, The Rope has attracted little attention from critics since its first appearance on the Provincetown Players stage on April 26, 1918 (although it was performed on television in 1989 [Eisen, “O’Neill” 117]). This may reflect the quick turnaround time between composition and first performance; O’Neill only finished the play on March 18. He appears not to have done much with it afterward, and the story of a miserly farmer father he would reconceive in the more justly famous Desire Under the Elms. Nevertheless, it continues a naturalist theme from McTeague that recurs in the playwright’s work: greed and its effects through the generations. As with another play he was working on during this period, Beyond the Horizon, Rope takes place not at sea but at its edge. There’s no comfort at the boundary—only extremity and varieties of discontent. In this play, it seems, all gold is fool’s gold, all discoveries ironic jokes.

Once again, the farm becomes a potent symbol. For a few of O’Neill’s sailing men, as we have seen in Bound East and Long Voyage, “farm” is the fantasy space in which all the ills of being at sea can be solved, a kind of land paradise visible only from the middle of the ocean. For Pat, Luke’s return threatens his attaining the Bentley farm—it has been willed to the prodigal, it seems; but when Luke arrives, the wanderer disdains being in one fixed place. “I ain’t made to be no damned dirt puncher—not me!” he tells Pat. After all, he’s seen the noose—the play’s telltale artifact—and realized the old man, Abraham, would be pleased to have him swing in it.