[The following article is excerpted from the author's manuscript, "American Drama in the Age of Film," to be published in 2007 by the University of Alabama Press.]

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. — Edmund, Long Day's Journey into Night

Eugene O'Neill didn't like the theater very much, but he liked the cinema even less. Ironically, among all the screen adaptations of his work, he truly loved John Ford's The Long Voyage Home. First of all, the movie derived from four humble one-acts written very early in the playwright's career, not from such later splashy successes as Strange Interlude, The Great God Brown, or Mourning Becomes Electra. Secondly, although O'Neill always insisted that theatrical productions follow his texts faithfully, Ford's film hardly paid slavish attention to the source material. Surprisingly, perhaps, O'Neill responded very enthusiastically to the liberal treatment given his little plays. After reading the script in advance of the film's release in 1940, O'Neill congratulated screenwriter Dudley Nichols in a letter which included the following statement: "I believe a picture of a play should concentrate on doing those things which the stage cannot do. Then a balance can be struck in which the picture medium brings fresh drama to the play to take the place of the stuff which belongs to the stage and cannot be done as well in pictures" (Selected Letters 503). The fact that O'Neill clearly loved the film yet felt entirely unthreatened by its success suggests that he felt that the two enterprises were entirely separate. A synergistic relationship between theater and film, O'Neill says, works to strengthen the understanding and independence of both forms.

Comparing The Long Voyage Home to the source plays from which the movie is taken builds a case for the unique properties and capabilities of drama. It is commonplace to assume that film adaptations "open up" a drama with a more expansive treatment of space and time. Surprisingly, Ford's film defies that expectation and, in the process, shows what O'Neill's little plays do. And, in so doing, the source plays of the fine Ford film, all written when O'Neill was a relatively unknown talent, reveal the early signs of later techniques perfected in a mature masterpiece such as The Iceman Cometh and strive to transcend theatrical limitations.

In his letter to Nichols, O'Neill did not elaborate further about those things on film "which the stage cannot do," or which aspects of theater "cannot be done as well in pictures." Several years later he maintained that the "talkless parts" were the high points of the film for him. That he liked it at all is truly remarkable. Although America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright liked the idea of theater and film very much, the practice of the commercial Broadway "Show Shop" and popular Hollywood claptrap appalled him. As early as 1924, he announced, "I don't go to the theatre because I can always do a better production in my mind than the one on stage. I have a better time and I am not bothered by the audience" (qtd. in Cargill 112). While he often failed to attend the opening nights of his own plays, he did work on productions during the rehearsal periods. He had nothing whatsoever to do with any of the film adaptations of any of his plays and regarded Hollywood as merely a source for income. Even this detached demeanor, however, did not come without regrets. O'Neill tried to barter the sale of Mourning Becomes Electra for $150,000, the price for which he was apparently willing to suffer the consequences of having to endure the film. In his letter to Theresa Helbrun in 1944, O'Neill appealed to her memory of the stage triumph at the Theatre Guild: "Do we want to let Hollywood debase (as it must, being at heart, even with the best intentions, merely a commercial mob amusement racket) the Mourning Becomes Electra in our memories, the achievement that had great significance, whereas the picture will have none?" (Selected Letters 558).¹ About the filming of The Hairy Ape, O'Neill expressed further regrets about relinquishing the rights to one of his very favorite plays and fondest memories in the theater: "I didn't really want to sell because I knew no one in Hollywood had the guts to film my play, do it as symbolic expressionism as it should be done, and not censor it into imbecility, or make it a common realistic stoker story. . . . So when I tell you I am not going to see the film—nor read one word written about it—nor even ever admit that it exists, I sure mean it! (Selected Letters 558).

The films of The Hairy Ape (1944) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), the last movie of an O'Neill play made during the author's lifetime (1888-1953), immediately succeeded The Long Voyage Home. Prior to those films, according to John Orlandello, "There is no indication that O'Neill ever saw any of the films made from his works during the 1930s—reports from friends and reviews of the films dissuaded him from seeing them" (12). Anyone who has seen the execrable film version of Strange Interlude (1932), starring Norma Shearer's amazing eyebrows, can surely empathize with the playwright's position. O'Neill liked very much the silent film version of "Anna Christie" (1923), but he hated the idea of Garbo in the role of her first "talkie" and her immortal opening line: "Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby." Garbo had none of the hardness of Blanche Sweet in the earlier adaptation, the sea as fate lost all its significance, and the love story wallowed the whole thing into a happy ending, the very ending that O'Neill had wanted to avoid in the play, but which had always plagued interpretations of the work.

By contrast, O'Neill claimed to his daughter, Oona, that The Long Voyage Home was "an exceptional picture with no obvious Hollywood hokum or sentimental love bilge in it" (Selected Letters 513). He even owned a 16mm print so that he could watch the movie at home whenever he wished. The film, however, did not copy the stage play. O'Neill, always a stickler for theatrical productions adhering to his script and stage directions as closely as possible, recognized the need for changes to accommodate a new medium. Addressing the range of quality among adaptations of O'Neill's plays to the screen, Kurt Eisen eloquently states the challenge for the would-be producer: "To capture the spirit of an O'Neill play in cinematic form requires not a literal fidelity to the original stage version but a comparably defiant attitude towards easy formulas—to film against the grain of Hollywood, just as O'Neill always tried to write against the prevailing norms of Broadway—including the very norms his own work helped to establish" (120). A director must re-contextualize the radical in one medium as radical in a new medium. Distilling the essence of the source work, different means gain different ends.

The Long Voyage Home achieves narrative coherence by tying together four disparate one-acts of the sea: Bound East for Cardiff (1914), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1917). O'Neill didn't write the plays consecutively or envision them, initially at least, as part of a set. They were all produced separately. Some of the individual plays feature the same characters, but each play carries its own independent action. Bound East for Cardiff was the first O'Neill play ever to be performed and it concerns the last dying moments of an injured sailor, Yank, and the tender ministrations of his friend, Driscoll. In the Zone is a well-crafted melodrama that leads to a surprise ending as it follows the heartbreaking story of Smitty, whose wife left him because he could not quit drinking. The Long Voyage Home features the struggles of the Swede Olson to leave the sailor life behind and return to his native homeland. Finally, The Moon of the Caribbees once again depicts Smitty's loneliness, but this time in counterpoint to the drunken and celebratory spirits of his less refined shipmates. Stylistically and artistically, each play is distinct as well. While In the Zone has the most straightforward narrative, the last play has virtually no plot and succeeds through its creation of atmosphere, panorama of ensemble characters, and evocation of a mood. O'Neill, himself, felt that the former drama was representative of the best plays of the past, while The Moon of the Caribbees contained elements of drama's future.² Despite the differences within the plays, they were first grouped together on a single bill in 1924 at the Provincetown Playhouse under the direction of James Light with the title, S.S. Glencairn, the name of the tramp steamer on which the sailors serve. The plays have been presented several times since then with that title. O'Neill, too, later referred to the plays as his Glencairn Cycle and envisioned an O'Neill repertory producing it regularly.

Dudley Nichols's screenplay incorporates all the plays in one central action: Olson's last voyage, a dangerous transatlantic crossing from the United States to London on a Merchant Marine vessel, the Glencairn, loaded with ammunition to aid the war effort against the Nazis in 1940. The time is updated from the First World War to the next, and, whereas only In the Zone takes place during wartime, Ford's film fits entirely within the context of the war environment. The order of the plays is changed such that action begins with The Moon of the Caribbees, followed by Bound East For Cardiff, In the Zone, and ends with The Long Voyage Home. The action remains episodic, and the shift from one play to the next is still detectable, but there is a sense of movement as the sailors go from liberty, anchored in the West Indies (the setting for Moon), to crossing the ocean (Bound East For Cardiff, In the Zone), to reaching port in blacked-out London (The Long Voyage Home).³ Several episodes in the screenplay depart from the source material to bridge the action from one play to the next and to reinforce thematic significance and structural integrity. I'll outline many of those changes and additions below, but a couple deserve special mention. The well-educated Smitty is killed by German aircraft in the movie, and the refrain, "Smitty's going home," resonates with the preceding death of Yank (from Bound East For Cardiff) and also amplifies the title of the film and the decision to put The Long Voyage Home in the anchor position among the four plays. The film ends quite differently than the one-act. In O'Neill's play, unscrupulous money-grubbers drug the sailor Olson and crimp him aboard the Amindra. Once again, Olson fails to get home. In the film, Olson's shipmates save him, but sailors from the Amindra knock Driscoll out in a fight and press him into service to replace Olson. The final scene shows one of the Glencairn shipmates reading a headline in a newspaper proclaiming that a German U-Boat has sunk the Amindra and that the entire crew has been killed. In the play, Olson says that he wants to go home, yet he continually makes decisions that force him back out to sea. He tries to stop himself from drinking, but he finally agrees to a drink anyway in spite of past experiences. The irony rests entirely with the individual. In the film, Olson and Driscoll function as interchangeable parts. Either one will serve the ship. It doesn't matter which one. Here, the irony of the film involves the social exploitation of these relatively "faceless" men upon whose backs war is waged and won.

The "talkless" parts of the film, gorgeously photographed by Gregg Toland, portray the sailors aboard ship and the ship in action. These moments would be impossible to achieve on stage: the Glencairn loading cargo in port; the gangplank raised/lowered; smokestacks belching steam; the ship leaving harbor; sailors battening down a tarpaulin; a violent storm at sea and Yank's fall from a ladder (a scene only alluded to in the play); Yank's burial at sea, with rear projections of the waves and whitecaps in the background and ocean spray drowning out almost all the words of the quick funeral service; the aircraft raid that kills Smitty (the viewer never sees the planes overhead—only the effects of the attack: bombs splashing in the water and an array of bullet holes from machine guns); Smitty's grieving family who greets the ship at the dock; sailors departing from the ship and walking down the gangplank for shore leave; sailors traipsing through the wet, dark streets of London looking for an appropriate watering hole; the men returning to their ship, broke, with no options left except to sign up for another tour of duty. While each play limits scenic space to a single area, the ability of the camera to film the sailors in time and space, to show them at their work, rather than merely reporting it, gives tremendous insight into the pathos of their struggle.

The film exploits the fact that the camera can lead the viewer to multiple positions. O'Neill's plays are all written for a proscenium theater and his detailed, often mocked, stage directions indicate various stage positions, including stage left and right, upstage and downstage. It is assumed that the audience sees the play "frontally." The opening of the film distinguishes the possibilities of stage and film action. In The Moon of the Caribbees, O'Neill presents a cross section of the ship as the focal point in the action. The ship is anchored off of an island and throughout the action distant singing from that island can be heard. O'Neill places that island upstage and it is clear from his stage directions that it is represented scenically on a perspective drop showing the horizon line: "In the rear the dark outline of the port bulwark is sharply defined against a distant strip of coral beach, white in the moonlight, fringed with coco palms whose tops rise clear of the horizon" (CP1 527). The upstage area is only scenic space. If a figure were to stand against the backdrop, the illusion of the perspective would be ruined. All the action takes place on the downstage "boat." The film, on the other hand, faces no such restrictions. The opening sequence cuts between the native women on the shore, undulating to the rhythms of the music, and the ship's outline in the distance, to the sailors on the Glencairn, looking back toward the island, and restlessly responding to the sounds of the music and the expectations for the night. The wordless cutting between both locales builds tension beautifully in preparation for the eventual meeting of men and women on deck.

The camera's ability to achieve close-ups on the actors' faces also gives it a significant advantage over the stage at key moments. Bound East For Cardiff becomes very intimate once Driscoll decides to stay by the bunk of the dying Yank. O'Neill's stage directions concerning the dying sailor become similarly intimate: "A spasm of pain contracts his pale features. He presses his hand to his side and writhes on the thin mattress of his bunk. The perspiration stands out in beads on his forehead" (193). In a theater, who would actually see this stage picture? O'Neill describes something that is simply not visible to an audience from any appreciable distance. His directions orient to the printed page and a reading public.⁴ In the film, however, those same directions are quite readable as the camera comes in within just a few feet of Yank. The perspiration on his face is visible; his pain is palpable as he writhes on the bunk. The perspective achieves such intimacy that the final moments leading to his death are painful to see. There is none of the detachment that a stage view mandates. The audience is with the men surrounding Yank. Similarly, in In the Zone, O'Neill solves the problem of intimacy by having Smitty turn his face to the wall as his shipmates read aloud his very personal letters. In the film, however, the camera cuts back and forth between the letter reader and a tight close-up of Smitty's tortured face as he hears the spilled contents. The proximity of the camera to the victims greatly intensifies both scenes.

Overall, however, much of the camera work in the film recreates stage compositions, due to the fact that photographer Gregg Toland relied extensively upon a low angle camera and a wide angle lens. This creates the effect of having a very good orchestra seat in which the viewer is at once close to the stage action and sees it at ground level, and at the same time sees the stage action radiate toward the wings on either side. There are a number of times in which Toland fits two whole-bodied actors within the same shot, while at the same time capturing the physical environment around them. There's a moment when Smitty, after his humiliation below deck, stands in dark silhouette downstage and Olson appears slightly above him upstage. The shot frames both actors in their entirety. Whereas in the theater, such a shot might emphasize the distance between the figures and the space around them, such a cinematic shot has an opposite effect: the figures fill up the screen. The entire film creates a claustrophobic sense of space as Ford fills up his shots with figures that often appear to be on top of one another. Oddly, for a movie that takes place mostly at sea, there are very few shots of the expansive ocean surrounding the ship. Instead, the camera emphasizes the cramped conditions under which the men lead their lives. In his book on Ford, Peter Bogdanovich quotes the filmmaker: "We purposely kept it in confined space—that was what the story called for. Life on a ship is claustrophobic, but you get accustomed to it" (qtd. in Orlandello 100). The viewer gets accustomed as well to the experience that the camera creates.

The claustrophobic sense that the film develops deserves special comment because it is counterintuitive and contrary to the popular assumption of how films "open up" plays. Indeed, my earlier discussion of the cutting between land and sea in the opening sequence of The Long Voyage Home, moving between shots of the women on the island and the men aboard ship, describes an unusual expansiveness. But, that sequence of shots also emphasizes the distance between the men and women and the isolation of their lives. Ford could have depicted the vast spaces of ocean travel. O'Neill often conveys very romantic notions about the sea and what it represents as a kind of escape from life on land.⁵ The essential claustrophobia of the movie is, itself, another important irony. The sea is often referred to as representing a kind of freedom, but in the film it is anything but that. In the film, Ford chose to shoot at close quarters to depict lives of confinement. The cramped conditions that Ford creates in his film are not possible on the stage.

While the film director and photographer decide how to break up space in accord with a vision of the picture, the playwright and director enjoy no such plasticity in a theatrical space. Whereas the film director works on a new canvas with each shot, the playwright and director must use one canvas for the entire play. O'Neill spreads the stage both visually and aurally in his sea plays. The number of distinct voices, dialects and nationalities gives the director the chance to develop an interesting sound to the play and develop a rhythm akin to a musical score. Among the sailors are a Swede, a Russian, a Norwegian, an American, several from disparate parts of England, an Irishman, and a Scot. Speaking from various points on a stage creates a sonorous effect. In the film, of course, this is not possible, because all of the sound comes from a few speakers. Distinct voices divert attention in the theater to each respective position on the stage. Visually, O'Neill's stage spaces constantly balance groups of community with individuals in isolation or solitude. Whereas the film must cut from one part of the scene to another, the stage space accommodates both pictures simultaneously.

The first part of Bound East For Cardiff introduces the men of the ship, who are either returning to their bunks after a shift on deck, or else preparing for their next shift. Only after the men settle does Yank, the sailor who has had an accident, groan from an upstage berth. Having already seen some of the men immediately "fall asleep" in their bunks, the initial sequence establishes the link between sleeping and dying as normal human processes. The stage space telescopes once Driscoll kneels by his friend's bunk to stay with him until the end. The continual comings and goings of the crew as they go about the very necessary business of the ship counters the intimacy of this exchange. Yank's dying speeches border on the highly melodramatic, but the relative disinterest among the crew gives notice to the fact that while one life ends, the life of the ship must keep to a routine. The ship's bells, which signal changes in post, further remind an audience that the cyclical pattern of daily toil is ongoing. As he lies dying, Yank sees fog and then "a pretty lady in black." Both of these visions are rather formulaic tropes for death, but the visual reminder that life goes on elsewhere gives the scene poignancy. Yank's last muffled gasps are masked by the indifferent snores of men resting before the next bells will revive them for several more hours of work. The insignificance of Yank's death, the fact that he will not be missed dearly by anyone other than Driscoll, gives the final moments of the play unusual dignity.

Similarly, both In the Zone and The Long Voyage Home present simultaneous scenes in which the loneliness and isolation of one character balances against the community building of a larger group. Smitty is the outcast in the former play and identified as such primarily because of his dialect. Educated with the "King's English," his speech, combined with his loner sensibility and perceived arrogance, separate him from his fellow shipmates. At the start of the one-act, he surreptitiously takes out a metal box from hiding and checks its contents. Unfortunately, another member of the crew sees him at it, and when Smitty steps out of the forecastle to stand alone on deck, the remaining shipmates begin to discuss his behavior. The fact that they don't like him allows them to run wild with an imaginative story that he might be a German spy. One man is assigned to watch Smitty through the doorway. O'Neill doesn't indicate whether or not Smitty is visible to the audience, but a contemporary production would do well to show him alone sitting quietly on deck with his own thoughts while his shipmates concoct a fantastic, though almost logical story, against him. Once Smitty returns, they bind and gag him and, fearful of finding a bomb, open his precious box. They discover, to their surprise, only personal letters from his fiancé. As described above, the film effectively cuts between the letter reading of the group and a close-up of Smitty's face. Obviously, the close-up is not possible in the theater. Instead, in O'Neill's dramaturgy, the audience sees Smitty's complete, full-bodied physical reaction simultaneously with the words that are spoken. Once it becomes clear to the crew that Smitty is not guilty of espionage, they feel completely ashamed by the nature of the personal disclosures and slink away wordlessly to their bunks and finally turn off all lights at the very end of the play. The last image is Smitty alone with his grief, surrounded by the feigned sleeping rituals of the Glencairn crew.

Ostensibly, The Long Voyage Home begins as a farewell celebration for Olson before he boards another ship for his family farm in Stockholm. The fact that Olson refuses to drink, fearing that he will lose his resolve under the influence, makes him an outcast. While his friends abandon him, first at the bar, and then in the adjoining party room, Olson sits on the side where he is joined by the prostitute Freda. Olson's attempt to separate himself from his comrades is ultimately successful, albeit ironically so, and the unscrupulous plotters at Fat Joe's Bar drug his ginger beer, knock him out, and send him off with two roughs to the Amindra, a ship with a terrible reputation that is destined to sail below Cape Horn at the tip of South America. The visual separation of Olson from his friends shows dramatically the cost of his leaving the sailor life. It explains, as well, without saying so, why Olson has failed in every previous attempt to leave the sailor life behind. Visually, the stage picture makes clear his sense of unease and longing to be part of the group. The fact that outsiders victimize him, and not his own lack of moral resolve, makes events in this short play further ironic.

Smitty, once again, is the lonely figure in the last of the Glencairn plays, The Moon of the Caribbees. There's really no plot at all in this short play, but it is the best of the bunch. Smitty continually holds himself aloof from the singing, dancing, drinking and cavorting that happens on other parts of the stage. He remains lost in memories of the past, memories that are never fully articulated, though which clearly have to do with a woman. The Donkeyman is his only confidant, though his rather brutal suggestions about how to solve "woman problems" further alienate Smitty's refined sensibilities. The sound of singing and rhythmic chanting from the distant island adds yet another element of anxiety into the scene. Smitty finally says, to no avail: "I wish they'd stop that song. It makes you think of —well—things you ought to forget" (CP1 530). As an atmospheric piece, filled with moonlight, singing, music, dancing, and drinking, the play creates a space for reflection, certainly for Smitty, but by extension the audience as well. The whirl of activity, dancing and drinking and celebrating, offers a means of escape that Smitty simply can't embrace. As the Donkeyman observes, he is tied to memories of the land. Moments of stillness, when the ship is anchored and at liberty, allow private thoughts to creep aboard. When The Donkeyman sees another sailor and one of the native women moving off evidently for some privacy, he observes: "There's love at first sight for you—an' plenty more o' the same in the fo'c's'tle. No mem'ries jined with that" (539). The action of the play presents the sailor life as an escape from life left behind on land. Reflection, looking back, a product of deep feeling, the necessary exacted price for living in the world, causes heartache and despair.

Recurring patterns in O'Neill's sea plays raise questions about their authenticity as autobiographical works. O'Neill scholars commonly assume that the playwright wrote about what he knew from personal experience. Indeed, the number of fine biographies on the playwright all chronicle his adventures as a seaman and the pride he took in achieving "Able Bodied" rank.⁶ The most colorful character in the Glencairn series, Driscoll, a sailor whom he befriended and who later killed himself, became the model for Yank in The Hairy Ape. And the Glencairn plays were certainly not the only early plays drawn from life at sea. His first volume of published plays contained three one-acts staged in a sea environment. The Ahabish Ile (1917) concerned a captain's determined hunt for whales. Beyond the Horizon (1918), O'Neill's first Broadway success, takes place entirely on land, but the image of the unseen sea lifts the play from moribund realism. Chris Christophersen (1919) and the revised version that became "Anna Christie" both feature a land and sea division that casts "dat ole davil" sea as a kind of fate. In his later, more mature plays, such as Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1941), sailing and the sea represent an attempt to escape the fate of one's family, even as the characters remain rooted on land in their New England homes.

O'Neill's novel subject matter certainly challenged audiences to accept a muscular rawness on the stage which had not been seen previously. The visual dynamics of The Hairy Ape, for example, explored new realms of adventure as the ghostly Mildred, tired of life on the main deck with her wealthy crowd sunning themselves on deck chairs, determined to go below to the bowels of the ship to see "how the other half lives." Like the audience who watches her descent, Mildred is giddy with excitement about the prospect of a new experience, perhaps something she can record in her diary that evening before she pulls up her satin sheets. She wants to glimpse something new, and "the lower depths" serve as her amusement park. Fittingly, Yank crawls into the cage with the gorilla at the zoo at the end of the play because he has learned to see himself as a curiosity to be viewed from a distance. Just so, The Hairy Ape serves as something fresh for an audience constantly in search of filling an entertainment appetite. O'Neill provides with all his sea plays representations of the mostly unseen and often ignored. His plays often fulfilled in the early part of the last century the politics of representation that have become so much more visible in our world today. After seeing "Anna Christie," David Bone, who served in the British Merchant Marines, wrote to the New York Times: "I have seen Eugene O'Neill's play and I am greatly rejoiced that one has come who can show sailormen as we stand and the sea as something more than, than—a dressing room to the wings." Much like Yank, such men swelled with pride to see themselves at last onstage.

In fact, Ford's movie makes much more of this issue of representation than O'Neill's plays. After the titles at the beginning of the picture, a paragraph of text which Nichols wrote especially for the screenplay scrolls up the screen: "Men who live on the sea never change—for they live in a lonely world apart as they drift from one rusty tramp steamer to the next, forging the life-lines of nations." Given the representations of the seamen, the social statement is clear that the workers are being exploited, and that while the conditions under which they work are inhuman, their toil makes riches possible. In the war effort in the 1940 film, these simple and unheralded men perform truly heroic actions that will make victory possible. That the film should make evident the heroism of ordinary men is perfectly in keeping with the filmmaker who would next complete The Grapes of Wrath in the same year. While the film begins by making a social statement about the role of the unsung worker in a capitalist society and as a paean to the workingman in aid of the war effort, the end of the film hints at a more existential note in keeping with O'Neill's visions in the plays. Once again, text scrolls to end the film:

So men like Ole come and go
and the Driscolls live and die
and the Yanks and Smittys leave their memories—
but for the others the long voyage home never ends.

The film actually does very little to show why the long voyage "home" never ends. Ford's film does an excellent job of showing the sailors in their social situation, but those situations don't really lend themselves to the existential problem that O'Neill exploits in the stage plays. O'Neill is not particularly concerned with who forges the "life-lines of nations," but he is preoccupied with the individual's sense of worth, fate, and destiny. The film, quite brilliant in its own way, is ultimately interested in something quite different than what concerned O'Neill. Both Ford and O'Neill exploit their particular medium to do something radically different. Ford makes a social statement with his film; O'Neill makes an existential one.

This is where the critics' preoccupation with O'Neill as an auto-biographical artist leads to trouble. Instead of looking at the plays as a direct reflection of the writer's experience, it is important to turn that question around and determine what the chosen subject matter does for the dramatic message. What is the dramatic usefulness of the sea environment for O'Neill, such that he returns to it again and again in his plays? The sea plays allow him to articulate a vision of humanity that trumps any auxiliary social statement. Ford is surely right when he asserts that life on a ship is claustrophobic. Why, then, don't O'Neill's plays set at sea aboard the Glencairn produce a claustrophobic effect? Perhaps because that is not at all what interests him. For him, the ship does not produce a realistic image but serves a metaphorical purpose, one that is consistent with images perfected in his final great masterpieces. It's not so much, then, that O'Neill wrote what he knew, so much as the plays set at sea gave him an opportunity to write a certain kind of play to reflect his artistic vision. The same kind of argument could be said about Chekhov. Surely, the great Russian dramatist knew more than life as it existed on dull, country estates. That estate, however, provided him with a means to express perfectly his dramatic landscape of life in the subjunctive mood (e.g., "If only I were in Moscow . . .").

The story surrounding the original production of Bound East for Cardiff spawned one of the great foundation myths in the American theater. It didn't hurt that Susan Glaspell, an outstanding writer and playwright herself, chronicled O'Neill's introduction to the American theater. Her book, The Road to the Temple, satisfyingly describes the opening night performance of O'Neill's sea play. The Wharf Theatre, a shed really, at the end of a dock at Provincetown, provided the perfect environment for O'Neill's little play. The sound of the sea and water running underneath the floorboards augmented the performance. Edna Kenton, one of the founding members of the Provincetown Players, described the natural beauty of the converted theater on the wharf:

Old fish houses must have been constructed originally with some idea of a native theatre in mind—they are so native themselves to shore and sea. The whole seaward side of this one consisted of a great sliding door through which in the old days the fishermen's catch was thrown. Rolled back, it gave for backdrop Nature herself—the living sea. Through the holes in the floor—they were never mended—the lucky spectators watching the play at high tide could see and hear and smell and feel and almost taste the sea. In afternoons the passing boats moved in panoramic planes across it; at night their multi-colored lights drifted like slow fireflies between the audience and Long Point Light at the tip of Cape Cod. (20)

All the above sounds lovely, but the pictures of the theater and the production photographs once it "transferred" to The Playwrights' Theatre on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village convey none of the same romance. The very famous picture of the Players rigging scenery for Bound East For Cardiff, including O'Neill on a ladder and Jig Cook holding a pole, is, however posed, a study in amateurism. Indeed, Cook's idea for a theater was always in the best spirit of amateurism. There is every reason to believe that the now celebrated first production of an O'Neill play was pretty awful. O'Neill, by his own acknowledgment a terrible actor who suffered terribly from stage fright, played the part of the second mate. If that initial production could be seen with fresh eyes, opinion might pull it down from its lofty position in theater history. There is a reason that O'Neill bolted from such a theater once he got an opportunity to do so.⁷

The difference between the nostalgic images of a legendary theater and the reality that must have existed is analogous to the expansive vision of O'Neill's early sea plays and the restrictions of their locales and the limitations of the characters within them. While the actual playing in O'Neill's play may have been lacking, the vision for what it could be was not. This same tension is evident in the text of the plays themselves. O'Neill's first produced play was originally called Children of the Sea. He later changed it to a much better title that resonates with the pun on "bound." Certainly, the Glencairn is bound for port in Wales. Significantly, it is in transit, between one stop and another, moving, neither here nor there. O'Neill creates an image of a ship on a transatlantic voyage in the middle of the ocean, in play, between one stop and the next. Furthermore, once the ship does arrive in port, it will quickly reverse course and head back. So, in fact, there can be no final destination. But O'Neill also gets a second meaning from "bound," in the sense that the sailors are not free. They are confined to the ship and must go wherever it sails. The dying Yank utters his final lament: "This sailor life ain't much to cry about leavin'—just one ship after another, hard work, small pay, and bum grub; and when we git into port, just a drunk endin' up in a fight, and all your money gone, and then ship away again. Never meetin' no nice people; never gittin' outa sailor town, hardly, in any port; travelin' all over the world and never seein' none of it; without no one to care whether you're alive or dead" (CP1 195).⁸ To and fro, the cycle turns over endlessly. In the fog at sea, the Glencairn is a tiny ship in a vast ocean that dwarfs the human scale of existence. It fosters the illusion of freedom and one that allows the men to get lost in the fog, but it also imprisons them as well.

O'Neill's characters try to escape from land and memories associated with events that happened in the past. Smitty says to a companion in The Moon of the Caribbees: "We're poor little lambs who have lost our way, eh, Donk? Damned from here to eternity, what? God have mercy on such as we!" (538). The continual back and forth voyages of the ship, from port on one side of the world, back to the other, is the means to escape memories from what has been left behind. When the ship anchors, there's time for thought about such memories that the movement of the ship would otherwise cancel. The sea offers an escape from living life. It offers activity, but no purpose. This becomes clear in the only one of the plays that is set on land, The Long Voyage Home. Olson, the Swedish sailor, faces a Chekhovian predicament. He says that he wants to leave the sailor life behind and return to his family farm outside Stockholm, yet every time he gets drunk and spends all his available travel money, and must then return to the ship for yet another voyage. The three sisters don't go to Moscow because they don't want to go; Madame Ranevskaya loses her orchard because she doesn't care for it; Olson, too, doesn't go home because he feels more comfortable saying he wants to go home than actually doing it. He prefers, actually, to get drunk and enjoy the sodden camaraderie of his shipmates.

Just so, the Glencairn functions similarly to Harry Hope's Last Chance Saloon in The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill fills that play, set entirely on land in a bar, with sea and water imagery. Larry Slade, the most articulate of its patrons, introduces the bar to newcomer Don Parritt as "the Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller." He elaborates further: "Don't you notice the beautiful calm in the atmosphere? That's because it's the last harbor. No one here has to worry about where they're going next, because there is no farther they can go" (CP3 577-578). The bar, like the ship, is a safe zone where the men are completely free. Free from worry, free from responsibility, free from family, free from friends, free from commitment, free from love, free from all pain, and thus, free from all things that might make life worth living. The denizens of Harry Hope's each have their pipe dreams that someday they'll do the things they say they want to do and return to productive lives and intimate relationships. But, of course, those pipe dreams are smoky. The sailors, too, have the prospect of getting off the ship at each port and not returning to the sailor life. But, in most cases, they sign up for yet another tour of duty and the endless deferral of their own lives. In Ford's movie, one of the final set-ups is of the gangplank connecting dock to ship. One by one, the crew returns from leave, silent, downcast, somber, nursing hangovers, disheveled, perhaps disappointed that they must once again return to the Glencairn, having spent all their money, to sign up for another voyage, just as the captain predicted they would before they left. This scene is very similar to the start of the final act in The Iceman Cometh, in which the drunks return to Hope's bar, one by one, after having faced the fact that they did not have the courage to live outside the safety of the bar and the company that it afforded. Hickey, of course, was the one who set them on such a course for self-knowledge, arguing that they would find peace once they recognized and accepted their own wretchedness. At the end of act 1, Hickey, echoing Slade, advises them to "Let yourself sink down to the bottom of the sea. Rest in peace. There's no farther you have to go" (613). In fact, Hickey was wrong. The folks in the bar needed their pipe dreams to give themselves the illusion of freedom, of choice, of a better life tomorrow. The sailors of the Glencairn, too, always have another port in the distance at which they can disembark and call home. They instinctively know that they cannot stop, reflect upon their lives, and thus sink down to the bottom of the sea with self-knowledge. Their only choice is to get off or keep going. And so they sail the seas in repeated cycles, back and forth, back and forth, with hope in the distance, more frightening as it looms larger on the horizon.

These primitive little sea plays read as line drawings for the later masterpieces such as The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. The imagery in them corresponds very well to that found in the mature plays and I greatly prefer these plays to the flashier ones of the 1920s, when O'Neill fully established himself as an experimental and, at the same time, highly successful dramatist. The little sea plays don't rely upon expressionistic techniques, marionette figures, beating tom-toms, collapsing walls, historical figures, spotlights, masks, split personalities, choruses, interior monologues, big themes, or impressive technologies. They are very simple plays, but it is their very rudimentary nature that sets up the poetic stage beauty of an imagined world outside the theater. These simple plays play upon the emotions and perhaps ask us to look inside ourselves to that which we would otherwise keep hidden. They lack the pomp and theatrics of O'Neill's more experimental plays, but they provide the essence of the best O'Neill has to offer. The simplicity of the plays is easy to dismiss. Playwright Romulus Linney wrote recently about the neglect and derision O'Neill suffered at the hands of the New Critics in the 1950s, and countered that with his own deep feelings about having acted in one of the sea plays. Looking back, Linney champions the adolescence in O'Neill's work, the very quality that filled his professors with scorn: "It was evidently impossible at Oberlin College to believe a genius also adolescent. But I really did like The Long Voyage Home. With everyone else deep in Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, it may have seemed clumsy and primitive. But I liked it. I respected it. I knew the hush it drew from its audiences, because I had stood on a stage and both heard that hush and felt the understanding that was behind it" (847). Even today, the academic world, preoccupied with theories and big ideas, blanches at the prospect of dealing directly with human emotions. Quite simply, that's where O'Neill lives and triumphs.

Scenes from another movie, Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), summarize everything I've tried to say in praise of the theater. The movie, of course, chronicles the life of John Reed, the journalist who is the only American buried in the Kremlin. Reed dabbled in the arts as well and he, his wife Louise Bryant, and Eugene O'Neill were all at Provincetown when O'Neill's plays were first presented. The film depicts a rehearsal from another O'Neill sea play, Thirst, which was the second O'Neill play performed after Bound East For Cardiff. Beatty as Reed, the director, and Jack Nicholson as O'Neill, the intense playwright, huddle together to watch Diane Keaton as Bryant deliver an important speech near the end of the play. The scene takes place on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with three surviving members of a shipwreck. O'Neill's stage directions describe the sun as "a great angry eye of God" (CP1 51). He also specifies the fins of sharks circling around the boat ready to devour prey. A vast emptiness surrounds the little boat: "The sky above is pitilessly clear, of a steel blue color merging into black shadow on the horizon's rim" (31). As it was in real life, the actual stage space for the performance in the film is pitifully small. There is only room for the rowboat. There are no sharks. The ceiling of the wharf theatre, that vast expanse of blue sky, is only about as tall as Ms. Keaton. A variety of drapes mask the windows immediately upstage to highlight the playing area. That great angry eye of God, the sun, is a large, bright spotlight that hangs from above and intrudes upon the action. In a play about heat from the sun driving the characters to madness, the film somewhat inexplicably changes the reference from the sun to the moon. Nicholson turns to Beatty in conference to make one important direction: "Tell them not to stand behind the moon!" Keaton reads her lines woodenly as "The Dancer," moves stiffly, and appears incapable of avoiding what little in the way of scenery exists. The film deftly presents this hilarious little scene in all its extreme tawdriness.

Beatty undoubtedly chose to represent this scene in his film because, although Reed didn't actually direct the play, Louise Bryant did act in it, and O'Neill, himself, played the mostly silent part of the Negro Sailor, the target of The Dancer's address.⁹ Creative license put Reed in the director's chair and placed the passionate playwright beside him to watch the actress perform. Bryant, too, became O'Neill's lover for a short time and so the film packages their menage-a-trois in theatrical terms. But despite the comic nature of the scene, which shows all the slovenly talent and impoverished conditions of the amateur theater, the words of Thirst warrant listening to them. The Dancer, desperately going mad from the tropical heat, reaches out to the mulatto: "Look! I am offering myself to you! I am kneeling before you—I who always had men kneel to me! I am offering my body to you—my body that men have called so beautiful" (48). Just as The Dancer offers herself to the sailor, just as Louise Bryant offered herself to the playwright, the little play offers itself to the public. Watching in the dark, detached observation allows an audience to see clearly the cost not simply to live, but to love and to commit deeply to choices and responsibilities. The Glencairn sailors stand in for the audience and perform their cyclical voyage as a sacrifice, the true gift theater offers. God have mercy on them.

NOTES

1. The ephemeral nature of theater leaves no physical trace and allows memories to create and perpetuate experience. O'Neill expresses concern that the presence of a film will overshadow the memory of the great production in his mind.

2. See O'Neill's letter to Barrett Clark in Selected Letters (87). The emphasis on suspenseful plotting made In the Zone a very effective melodrama. The lack of plot and the evocation of mood and atmosphere in The Moon of the Caribbees pointed the drama in a new direction.

3. See note above. The lack of action in Moon gives it an expository feel that made it a logical choice to go first in Ford's movie.

4. See Richard Hayes, "`The Scope of the Movies': Three Films and Their Influence on Eugene O'Neill" Eugene O'Neill Review 25 (2001): 37-53. Author pays particular attention to Bound East for Cardiff and says that a theatrical audience can't possibly see, concerning Yank's dying condition in his bunk, what O'Neill describes in his stage directions. He argues that O'Neill "clearly thought about the character in terms that were cinematic" (40).

5. While the sea represents a kind of malevolent fate in "Anna Christie," the sea as freedom and escape is voiced in all periods of O'Neill's playwriting, from Paddy in The Hairy Ape (1921), to Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and to Edmund in Long Day's Journey into Night (1941).

6. See Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) and Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Stephen A. Black, Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999).

7. O'Neill left the Provincetown Players for good after the success of The Hairy Ape in March 1922. In search of better, more professional productions, as well as cutting edge techniques, he formed The Experimental Theatre, Inc. (also known as the Triumvirate) with Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones.

8. Until the recent conflicts in the Mideast, the Navy used to recruit on television by advertising: "See the world [. . .]."

9. George Cram (Jig) Cook, Susan Glaspell's husband and the leader of the Provincetown Players, is credited as director for the production.

WORKS CITED

"Anna Christie." Dir. John Griffith Wray. Perf. Blanche Sweet. Ince Studios, 1923.

_____. Dir. Clarence Brown. Perf. Greta Garbo. MGM, 1930.

Bone, David W. "Sea Across the Footlights." New York Times 15 Jan. 1922, sec. 3: 3.

Cargill, Oscar, N. Bryllion Fagin, William J. Fisher, eds. "O'Neill Talks About His Plays." O'Neill and his Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, 1961. 110-112.

Eisen, Kurt. "O'Neill on Screen." The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Michael Manheim. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 116-134.

Emperor Jones, The. By Eugene O'Neill. Dir. Dudley Murphy. Perf. Paul Robeson, Dudley Digges. United Artists, 1933.

Glaspell, Susan. The Road to the Temple. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1926. Ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.

Hairy Ape, The. Dir. Alfred Santell. Perf. William Bendix. United Artists, 1944.

Kenton, Edna. The Provincetown Players and The Playwrights' Theatre 1915-1922. Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.

Linney, Romulus. "O'Neill." Southern Review. 38.4 (Autumn 2002): 842-848.

Long Voyage Home, The. Dir. John Ford. Prod. Walter Wanger. Photo. Gregg Toland. Writ. Dudley Nichols. Perf. John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald, Ian Hunter, John Qualen, Mildred Natwick. United Artists, 1940.

Mourning Becomes Electra. Dir. Dudley Nichols. Perf. Rosalind Russell, Raymond Massey. RKO, 1947.

O'Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays. Ed. Travis Bogard. 3 Vols. New York: Library of America, 1988. (Parenthetical references will cite respective volumes as CP1, CP2, or CP3.)

_____. Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. New York: Limelight, 1994.

Orlandello, John. O'Neill on Film. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

Reds. Dir. Warren Beatty. Perf. Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson. Paramount, 1981.

Strange Interlude. Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Perf. Norma Shearer, Clark Gable. MGM, 1932.