By KERRY REID

Companhia Triptal's production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Long Voyage Home," the second of three early "sea plays" that the Brazilian company has brought in for the Goodman's "Eugene O'Neill in the 21st Century" festival, only lasts 60 minutes. But getting to your seat first requires a short tour of hell.

The earliest sign that adapter/director Andre Garolli has no intention of playing this material straight comes as you enter the Goodman's smaller Owen Theatre. Just beyond the doors, you'll find pungent fog, mournful accordion dirges from an unseen musician and a salty sea dog of a host, who takes you to your seat by way of the backstage, past a gallery of lost souls, red-eyed and ragged and holding onto bottles of booze with bleary determination. It's like visiting a Halloween haunted house designed by social realist Maxim Gorky.

On the page, in English, O'Neill's play feels almost hopelessly dated, loaded with ethnic stereotypes, early 20th Century seafaring slang, and a plot not far removed from the moralizing Victorian melodramas he sought to destroy. It takes an inventive hand to make it fresh, and Garolli and his bold ensemble of vanity-free performers are largely up to the task.

The story is simple: After months at sea, a crew from the SS Glencairn (the home vessel of all of the "sea plays") has landed in London, looking for booze and women at the grimy harbor-side bar run by the scheming Joe. Only Olson has different plans. He's drinking soda, because he's determined to give up the seafaring life and its temptations and return to his brother and aging mother, whom he hasn't seen in a dozen years, on their farm outside Stockholm.

We know he won't get there. Garolli has changed the original material so that the play begins with O'Neill's ending, then works its way back there with a cunning twist or two. This circularity provides more nihilism than even O'Neill envisioned. Even those who try to stay virtuous, like Olson, will fall prey, over and over again, to the relentless tidal pull of the sea. Put down roots in the earth? Not a chance. "I drink and the world spins! And spins and returns—the world spins and you always return," one of the characters (adding lines by Garolli) observes at the end.

Delivered in Portuguese with supertitles (which seemed less in sync Wednesday night than for the company's earlier "Zona De Guerra"), the show as written works best as an evocation of generalized hopelessness, rather than a nuanced character study. But several performers find small, telling moments when the finer instincts of their natures poke through the alcoholic haze and grime. In addition to Roberto Leite's soulful Olson, there are rich performances from Juliana Liegel's Freda, a lonely and desperate prostitute, and Guilherme Lopes' swaggering Driscoll, a take-no-prisoners sailor capable of calling his mates every animal insult under the sun, but who doesn't quite see he is also trapped in an eternal hellhole of brutal labor and brain-numbing binges.