Though modern scholars frequently credit Eugene O'Neill with the advancement of dramatic realism, few of his plays fit a single, definitive genre. His early plays in particular reveal an experimental, gleefully untamed writer pushing the form and subverting realistic scenarios with a persistently substitutive dramaturgy. The plots themselves follow a radical subjectivity, a mercurial, unstable shifting between dramatic modes and points of view. Because all of his early-career sea plays, including the familiar S.S. Glencairn cycle (The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, and The Long Voyage Home) and a smattering of lesser-known others have only one act each, they remain notable, among many other reasons, for their obvious narrative and perspective shifts. O'Neill introduces one vision of reality, one center of the plot, but then supersedes the given dominant thread with another. More than his other novice one-acts, the sea plays display O'Neill's remarkable attention to atmospheric detail. Even as he moved into writing longer plays, O'Neill admitted as much: "The one-act play [. . .] is a fine vehicle for something poetical, for something spiritual in feeling that cannot be carried through a long play" (qtd. in Clark 41). Although critics often graft this comment onto the sea plays, these works' undeniable moods exist for more than mere effect.           

O'Neill introduces such sea illusionism, among other reasons, to contrast the objective and the subjective, to juxtapose real and imagined perceptions. In later plays with the ocean either in the foreground or the background, such as The Hairy Ape, Beyond the Horizon, "Anna Christie," and Long Day's Journey into Night among others, O'Neill uses talk of the seafaring life or visual effects themselves to similar ends. In Fog (1914) and Where the Cross is Made (1918), two of the more obscure but finally more accomplished sea plays, O'Neill expresses a consistent impatience with a single perspective, using the sea's tempting enchantment to distort supposedly dependable observations. While critics often find the plays' plots ludicrous and contrived—Fog involves four lifeboat-confined shipwreck survivors navigating their way through a dense fog while Cross depicts a senile captain awaiting an imaginary shipment of gold—O'Neill displays, through an emphasis on the visual and hearing senses themselves, his refusal to adhere to one viewpoint. In both plays, O'Neill establishes moods or narratives only to expunge them moments later, challenging the validity of both characters' and spectators' perceptions of events.

A short tale ripe for environmental overlay, Fog seems initially nothing beyond an exercise in mood. The plot itself appears straightforward: on the day following the shipwreck, two men from disparate social classes, a sleeping Polish servant woman, and her dead son float across a silent sea until a rescue boat arrives. Meanwhile, the play unfolds against a backdrop that metamorphoses gradually from opaque fog to translucent daylight. Bypassing the hackneyed plot, critics claim Fog's unremitting ambience as O'Neill's only feat: "Its most notable achievement [. . .] is in the creation of an atmosphere appropriate to the supernatural conclusion" (Bogard 37). Indeed, in his opening stage directions, O'Neill personifies the fog and overwhelms the stage with a haze of indistinction: "A dense fog lies heavily upon the still sea. [. . .] A menacing silence, like the genius of the fog, broods over everything" (97). The fog first appears as an omen of calamity, content to sit forebodingly on top of the scene waiting to happen. When dialogue begins to emerge from the small recesses of the onstage blur, however, the fog's menace activates, swallowing the invisible but audible characters and propelling the play past a mere experiment in atmospheric style. As the lifeboat floats into a half-view, the men's dialogue consists largely of their inabilities to see the sun and each other though the fog. The Businessman barks in the play's first words, "I wish the daylight would come" (97) and then asks the Poet about the Polish Woman mere feet away on the other side of the lifeboat: "Can you see her? You're nearer to her than I am" (101) and after, "Oh, if only this rotten fog would lift for a minute!" (106), then again, "Damn this fog!" (106). In the absence of adequate stage effects, the circling dialogue concerning perceptive disability produces a fatalistic air for both the lost characters and the similarly adrift audience.

O'Neill's innovation lies thus in his relegating the audience to the same blindness as the figures onstage. As the boat wades through the murky sea plateau, the characters remain secondary to the antagonistic fog within the spectators' sightlines. O'Neill first labels the two talking figures as "A Man's Voice" and "Another Man's Voice," but as the fog lifts slowly during the opening minutes, the first man transforms into "First Voice," "The Other Man," and finally "The Businessman" and the second man materializes into "Second Voice," "The Dark Man," and settles as "The Poet." Only then do the two men approach becoming actual characters. The audience cannot see the characters' faces until a third of the play has passed, instead having to rely on faint silhouettes: "Three figures in the boat are darkly outlined against the gray background of vapor. Two are seated close together on the thwarts in the middle. The other is huddled stiffly at one end. None of their faces can be distinguished " (97). O'Neill exhibits a collection of faint shapes to direct the spectators' glares forward. From the Businessman's first words about his inability to see, O'Neill aligns the audience with the equally myopic characters onstage. At play's beginning, neither party can even view the ocean water providing the characters' (and the play's) wavering foundation: "There is no wind and the long swells of the ocean are barely perceptible. The surface of the water is shadowy and unreal in its perfect calmness" (97). With his portentous, overcast characterization of the fog, O'Neill creates a world at sea while keeping water itself out of view. Furthermore, he links the ocean dreaminess with the failure of vision, the fear of no bearing in an endless saltwater plane.

The absence of sound effects in the play's first half only adds to the sea's narcotic effects, the silence providing as much ambience as the persistent noise in some of O'Neill's more sonic sea plays, such as The Moon of the Caribbees and Bound East for Cardiff. The missing sounds of a rescue ship or moving water prove just as threatening as the choppy sounds of circling sharks in his similarly-plotted shipwreck play, Thirst (1913). In Fog, the minimalist soundscape conveys both the literal isolation of the wafting raft itself as well as the terror boiling on the brim of the characters' psychologies. The Polish Woman's screams represent a melodramatic outpour of raw emotion, the only theme music for the survivors on their first night astray. The Businessman recalls the terrifying death of the woman's son the day before: "Ugh! It was awful—her cries, and the fog, and not another sound anywhere" (98). The absence of any other sound besides her wailing magnifies the play's sheer fright. But since the crying takes place before the play begins and the woman sits mute on the boat's other end, the audience must depend on the characters to narrate the happenings immediately following the wreck. O'Neill does not grant omniscience to any character or spectator, nor does he allow either to acclimate to any one condition for very long. The sound effect announcing the characters' final rescue demonstrates most blatantly O'Neill's extemporaneous shifts of both mood and plot. During what becomes one of many hair-raising pockets of stillness in between terse dialogue, a ship whistle jolts the play from its somnolence: "The silence is suddenly shattered by a deafening blast from the steamer's whistle " (108). A deep bellow of aggression, the rescue sound effect hardly provides the relief that the men believe a savior would. Although the whistle counters the play's trademark, nearly pathological silence, it arrives as an equally terrifying signal of other life, soon catapulting the play into a rescue fantasy. In a single sound cue, O'Neill turns over both the existent soundscape and the narrative itself.

Before this long-awaited catharsis scene, however, O'Neill changes the play's center numerous times. After establishing an ominous world of silence and grey shapelessness, he introduces a non-sequiter class dialogue into the play's middle section. O'Neill stalls the character labels at "The Businessman" and "The Poet" to reinforce the stock types that he wants to create instead of fully-realized characters. The Businessman claims he had never seen the Polish Woman before because she worked in the steerage, which he dismisses as "a filthy sort of hole" (102) whereas the Poet finds "the people in the steerage more interesting to talk to than the second-class passengers" (102). The Businessman also adds that "the child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off [. . .] I mean poverty—the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases" (99). Critics often misinterpret the play, specifically this section, as a naive social treatise. One scholar asserts, "The play is not primarily about two individuals but about two outlooks: pessimistic altruism (Poet) versus optimistic egoism (Businessman)" (Törnqvist, Souls 89). While such character subtitles may be accurate, O'Neill never suggests an earnest debate between the men and certainly not a discourse with which he asks the audience to take sides. Joel Pfister, in his psychoanalytical O'Neill study, Staging Depth, quells critics dismissing O'Neill's sea-set plays as manifestoes about class: "The young O'Neill may have been engaged more by the Jack London romance of his subject than by the opportunity it afforded him for social criticism" (Pfister 109). Still, neither the social debate nor the rhythmical ambience serves as O'Neill's endpoints. Rather O'Neill juxtaposes the visual fog with the displaced dialogue, creating a dramaturgical schizophrenia and hence denying a single viewable entryway into the play.

The abrupt shifts into and out of the admittedly "stilted" (Floyd 55) class conversation prove more telling than its content. The spectators find themselves suddenly in a drawing-room scene, as characters from different classes trade opposing life philosophies. While Travis Bogard correctly points out the mishmash of narratives onstage—"Against the haunted background and in the midst of the miraculous action, the dialogue of the two men sounds out-of-key. It is oddly Shavian" (27)—he fails to credit O'Neill with intentionally undermining his own dramatic structure. In a play so concerned with not allowing anyone too clear a perspective, O'Neill presents a certain "type" or genre of play only to replace it moments later. Soon the class dialogue gives way to an equally unrelated supernatural finale. In this respect, the play foreshadows the overturning dramaturgy of The Moon of the Caribbees, a work beginning as a naturalistic scene of sailor carousal, turning into a poetic meditation on Smitty's loneliness, shifting into a slice of violent melodrama including a stabbing, and ending in an abbreviated bit of scored pantomime. In both plays, each succeeding scene undercuts the integrity, the purity in form, of the one before it. The audience's sight, then, always falters. Contrary to the endless claims that the sea plays, particularly the Glencairn cycle, have little plot, Fog and The Moon of the Caribbees prove just the opposite: so many different clicks of plot exist that the spectator does not know where and, more importantly, how to look.

The expanding light, starting halfway through Fog and culminating in the play's concluding clear skies, expels the literal fog but cannot erase the murk's spiritual residue. Instead of revealing a desirable clarity, the sunlight reverses the fog's mystical airs and illuminates the scene's stark grotesqueness: "Now that it is lighter what appeared before like a bundle of white clothes can be seen to be a child four or five years old with a thin, sallow face and long, black curls. The body is rigid, wrapped in a white shawl, and the eyes are open and glossy" (105). In a sly description of the dead boy resembling a hooked fish, O'Neill shocks the audience out of its sea-spell and places in front of it an image from grim reality. Later, when the fog lifts completely, the men discover the Polish Woman, whom they had presumed only asleep, has in fact died. Yet even the appearance of the bodies does not snap the play into an all-encompassing objective reality. As sunlight appears, O'Neill robs the scene of any possible romantic illusionism, switching the characters and audience from not seeing enough to seeing too much.

Moreover, when the fog finally disappears, the characters and audience find themselves thrust in front of an unexpectedly epic landscape: "The curtain of fog suddenly lifts. The sun has just risen over the horizon rim and the berg behind them, its surface carved and fretted by the streams of water from the melting ice, its whiteness vivid above the blue-gray water, seems like the façade of some huge Viking temple" (109). The remote, claustrophobic imperceptibility opens up into a vista of nearly limitless sight, and the formless fog transforms into a towering, geometric monument of ice. As the raft approaches the iceberg, the Businessman finds relief "in finding out that what he took for some horrible phantom of the sea is an ice and water reality" (107). The Businessman, still entwined in O'Neill's seductive landscape, believes a supernatural presence at work. Though the character finds relief in his ability to define the mysterious tower as an object from a recognizable reality, the newfound sea architecture still represents an impending terror. The Poet argues that if they yell to the steamer, it will unknowingly travel through the half-fog and into the iceberg. The clearing sky brings nothing more than an alternate pathway towards death. Utterly inscrutable in its masking of the first scenes, the disappearing fog soon becomes a desirable retreat into not seeing.

Until the fog lifts, the characters and audience must rely upon each other to determine what they should perceive and in what direction they should look. The Poet and the Businessman often devolve into confirming one another's possible hallucinations. For instance, the Poet cries, "How cold the air is! Or is it my imagination?" while the Businessman robotically confirms his feeling: "No, I notice it too" (106). Another incident finds the men on the brink of madness with only each other to affirm their sanities:

The Poet: Sssh! Do you hear that?

The Businessman: What? The whistle?

The Poet: No. This is a sound like running water. There! Don't you hear it now? (A noise as of water falling over rocks comes clearly through the fog).

The Businessman: Yes I hear it. What can it be? (106)

O'Neill polarizes the two men in their social views not to write, as critic Virginia Floyd states, "a vehicle to express his philosophical beliefs" (Floyd 55), but rather to force an ironic interdependence between two characters who cannot, quite literally, see eye to eye. Their mutual perception faces accusations of delusion, however, when the rescue officer informs the men how he tracked them down: "We could hear the kid crying all the time [. . .]. That's how I was able to shape such a direct course for you. I was steering by the sound" (111). Both the Businessman and the Poet attest that the boy has been dead for a day, leading the officer, who heard the cries only minutes ago, to "conclud[e] that he has two madmen to deal with" (112). O'Neill ends the play without categorizing either perspective as reality. Instead, he stresses the fundamental interdependence among all characters to interpret stimuli as they navigate blindly through the sea air. The rescuers, too, must follow the aural cues of the boy's crying to find the lifeboat through the fog. By the end, O'Neill has pushed all movement to the hesitative, all sensory perception to the skeptical.

Though they must share senses while trapped together, the Businessman and the Poet finally separate physically. The Businessman, eager to return to his materialistic life, leaves with the officers while the Poet, true to an earlier-stated death wish, prefers to "stay with the dead" (112). Despite his initial shock at the discovery of the dead bodies, the Poet settles into a hypnotic calm following his full sight of them: "He is sitting opposite the two rigid figures looking at their still white faces with eyes full of great longing" (112). Floyd states that by refusing rescue and choosing to stay with the woman and child, "the Poet also saves himself, spiritually as well as physically" (Floyd 56) as "O'Neill uses the rescue scene to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Poet" (57). Placing such significance on the brief, shallow class narrative and interpreting the Poet autobiographically as O'Neill's "first self-portrait" (55), Floyd dismisses the play as an indulgent venture through a young writer's social consciousness. But she overlooks the unfurling and evasive landscape, which directs the action towards not a good-versus-bad morality play but rather a tug-of-war between opposing perspectives. In this very early, so-called "novice" play, O'Neill already seeks to challenge both the limits and will of human perception.

Those accusing Fog's conclusion of contrivance—"The attempt to instill the play with a supernatural dimension through the description of the fog and the miraculous cry of the child fails [. . . and] becomes a deus ex machina, an easy way to resolve the play's conflict" (Floyd 59)—or as the culmination in a "movement from something deathlike to something lifelike" (Törnqvist, Souls 90) ignore that the ending still lacks any conclusiveness despite the literal fog clearing and a traditional rescue scene. As the fog mercifully breaks after obscuring most of the play's action, O'Neill grants the audience its original desire for clear perception, and the Businessman and Poet reach their desired fates of, respectively, life and death. Yet the confluence of desire and landscape ultimately appears too picturesque: the sun just rises over the horizon and "the fresh morning breeze ripples over the water" (112), implying a glossy mockery of a rescue scene more than a genuine salvation. The very presence of the officers at the eleventh hour suggests a surreal manifestation of the Businessman's subjective dreams of a rescue while the Poet's observation of the dead woman and child conveniently enlighten him to his own true deathlike spirit. The sudden and ideal manifestation of both characters' separate wants finally appears as a cruel joke on O'Neill's part. He upturns the narrative again, pushing the genre to satire and proposing that the lines between reality and illusion lie merely in each person's own wishful perception.       

Like Fog, Where the Cross Is Made lures the audience in through an opening mass of atmospheric stage directions. O'Neill combines the sea and moonlight into a single mesmeric force enveloping Captain Bartlett's seashore cabin: "The light from the binnacle sheds over [a compass] from above and seeps down into the room. [. . .] Moonlight, winnowed by the wind which moans in the stubborn angles of the old house, creeps wearily in through the portholes and rests like tired dust in circular patches upon the floor and table" (695). As in Caribbees, O'Neill paints the ocean moon as a hypnotic, Dionysian presence. Here he expands the formula to include an aural romance as well as a visual one. The ocean's crash functions as a melodious underscore to Cross's opening scene: "An insistent monotone of thundering surf, muffled and far-off, is borne upward from the beach below" (695). Thus before the play's first words, O'Neill immerses audience and characters alike in a dreamy womb of sensory calm, introducing the delusional Bartlett as the sea spirit's enslaved mascot.

Again, the ambience dominates a play containing only a thin plot: erstwhile sea captain Bartlett awaits a shipment of gold while his son Nat resists the temptation to be taken in by the same illusions. When Nat later gives into his own insanity and sees, along with his father, ghost crewmen delivering a treasure chest, his sister Sue attempts to restore the play to an ugly, pitiless reality. Following the opening montage of intoxicating sea intrigues, the initially rational Nat makes a clear distinction between the moonlight's illusionistic effects and the manmade light of reality: "There's a lantern on the sideboard there, Doctor. Bring it over and sit down. [. . .] Understand that I want you to get all the facts—just that, facts!—and for that light is necessary. Without that—they become dreams up here—dreams, Doctor" (696). Through stage effects, O'Neill establishes a border between reality and fantasy, the real lamp shining on "the facts" and the spellbinding moonlight glowing on the dreaming Captain Bartlett. Nat's opening exposition reemphasizes this divide, as O'Neill draws an explicit line between objective reality and the captain's highly subjective surveillance. As Nat informs the mental asylum doctor, Higgins, concerning his father, "He won't take any note of this light. His eyes are too busy—out there. (He flings his left arm in a wide gesture seaward)" (696). Obsessively staring into the horizon each night, pacing back and forth upstairs like Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman in his "lookout" (695) cabin, Bartlett arrives onstage a crusty, sea-drifting madman. He proves himself a walking representation of the sea's "mood of unreality," as "the moonlight harmonizes with [his] need for a world set apart from the everyday one, a world in which his dreams can come true" (Törnqvist, Souls 86). With the window moonlight and its reflection off the sea providing the insulated captain his only guidance to perceive the objects in his hideaway (and the memories in his mind), the forces of nature outside threaten to swallow him whole.

The characters' relentless desires, needs even, to become voyeurs mark Cross as another O'Neill play in which perception serves both as the subject and the dramatic engine. As in Fog, the play's first words, Nat's in this case, draw immediate attention to the act of perception: "Can you see, Doctor?" to which Higgins responds, "Yes—perfectly—don't trouble. The moonlight is so bright" (696). The navigation of the senses, especially sight, becomes paramount in an environment threatening to engulf the characters in its dense airs. Nat claims that the moonlight enables his father's fantasies: "The things he wants to see can't be made out in daylight—dreams as such" (697) and concludes that only institutionalization will halt his father's unblinking stare towards the sea, "He's up there—watching—as he always is. [. . .] I believe—it would be better for him—away—where he couldn't see the sea" (702). Only by obstructing his father's view of the sea can Nat transfer his father from a world of illusion to one of reality.

Aware of Captain Bartlett's permanent outward gaze, Nat early on evinces a lucid recognition of the sea's seductive powers and vows a retreat from the water to save himself from his father's "mad game with me—whispering dreams in my ear—pointing out to the sea—mocking me with stuff like this!" (705). Fully immersed in the fantasy of the sea spell, Bartlett threatens to imbue his son with the same hallucinations, which O'Neill represents through that most mythic spoil of the sea, the treasure chest. The mere mention of the treasure draws attention to the ersatz lore of the sea, the dangerousness of subscribing to an ocean religion that spins yarns about pirates, shipwrecks, and buried riches. Even the title for the play, "Where the Cross Is Made," evokes the vocabulary of a treasure map, another relic of seafaring legend. Though Nat knows the objective facts about the treasure—the supposed boat delivering the gold wrecked and sank to the ocean floor years before—he still fears adopting his father's sea-influenced madness, contagious in its promises for rewards: "(fiercely) He made me doubt my brain and give the lie to my eyes—when hope was dead—when I knew it all was a dream—I couldn't kill it! (his eyes starting from his head) God forgive me, I still believe! And that's mad—mad, do you hear?" (705). Nat dreads losing his individual perception and abandoning faith in his own eyesight. O'Neill's stage direction that Nat's eyes nearly pop from their sockets represents visually Nat's increasing anxiety of sightlessness, the "lie to [the] eyes" in which his father's fictitious view will replace his own realistic one.

As Floyd somewhat accurately states, "The focus of the drama is the struggle [. . .] for the soul of Nat, who totters precariously on the periphery of insanity" (Floyd 164). Though she overstates the center of a play notable for O'Neill's decentering techniques, Nat's struggle remains a significant subplot. Just as soon as he discerns reality in the first scene, understanding the sea as a dangerous tempter polarizing himself and his father, Nat begins to gravitate towards the sea's dream world. As in Fog and other sea plays, characters face the dangers of shared perception particularly when the tempting sea itself—all moonlight glimmer and lulling wave breaks—so easily activates the illusionary spirit within. In The Moon of the Caribbees, O'Neill dramatizes this surrender and retreat to the sea spirit quite literally, as Smitty alternates between the moonlit boat deck scored to an elegiac, "melancholy Negro chant" (527) and the enclosed, dank forecastle full of the seamen's naturalistic raucousness. Then in Where the Cross Is Made, O'Neill elevates Smitty's ambivalence, dramatizing the same real-versus-illusionistic conflict as a battle for the son's very existence. Nat has a history of confrontation with the sea before the play even begins. In contrast to the play's wordless, ethereal opening showcasing the sea's mystical beauty, Nat arrives onstage as a pathetic and clumsy cripple: "His right arm has been amputated at the shoulder and the sleeve on that side of the heavy mackinaw he wears hangs flabbily or flaps against his body as he moves" (695). He blames the sea, and particularly his father's far-fetched beliefs in its rewards, for his condition: "(violently) Oh, him and the sea he calls to! Of the damned sea he forced me on as a boy—the sea that robbed me of my arm and made me the broken thing I am" (703). For all the open water's picturesque value, Nat physically displays that the sea soon turns on those that it so easily attracts. As he demonstrates in Fog when the daylight reveals a presumed mass of clothes as the boy's shell-shocked corpse, O'Neill subverts a pure, atmospheric mode with an image from gross reality. In a single image, O'Neill switches the genre from an intangible mood piece to a concrete melodrama and recasts the initially entrancing sea now as a limb-severing villain.

Before long, however, Nat obfuscates the clear divide between reality and illusion that he articulates earlier. Captain Bartlett soon observes his ship in the distance and calls for his son's confirmation of the sight. Despite his vocal efforts to avoid a visual alignment with his father, Nat unwittingly surrenders his personal perspective:

Bartlett: No other, I say! The Mary Allen—clear in the moonlight. And heed this: D'you call to mind the signal I gave to Silas Horne if he made this port o' a night?

Nat: (slowly) A red and a green light at the mainmast-head.

Bartlett: (triumphantly) Then look out if ye dare! (He goes to the porthole, left forward.) Ye can see it plain from here. (commandingly) Will ye believe your eyes? Look—and then call me mad! (Nat peers through the porthole and starts back, a dumbfounded expression on his face.)

Nat: (slowly) A red and a green at the mainmast-head. Yes—clear as day. (707-08)

Just as Fog's two men must confirm one another's sights of the iceberg and approaching rescue ship, Cross's father-and-son dialogue amounts to one person's perception of an object followed by the other's corroboration. The similarity applies aurally as well: the Poet and the Businessman defy insanity by expressing their mutual hearings of the rescue whistle, while Bartlett and Nat find a similar salvation in their shared auditory perceptions. Bartlett exclaims, "They're a-rowin' ashore. I heard the oars in the locks. Listen!" and Nat responds, "I hear! (708-709). The commands and responses in both plays evolve from characters reassuring themselves, and each other, that insanity has not clouded the senses. But instead of Fog's Poet and Businessman affirming one another's sanities (since, true to their ears, the rescue ship does in fact arrive), Bartlett and Nat contribute to each other's madness as the crewmen's sounds reside only in the two men's imaginations. In Nat's increasing descent towards the numinous ocean world, O'Neill overturns the play's genre again, this time from man-versus-nature melodrama to supernatural fantasy.

The spectators, meanwhile, remain confounded regarding which figure to believe. O'Neill shifts alliances throughout, supplying the audience with contradictory cues and mercurial setpieces. At first, Nat appears the voice of reason, warning the doctor about the moonlight inducing an unhealthy dreamlife. But when Nat begins to share his father's hallucinations, his reliability as a navigator for the audience falters. Within moments, he switches from expressing caution about the sea trance outside to claiming he hears the three crewmen docking with their treasure. The rational Sue then takes the reins as the audience's guide, pleading with Nat to shake free of his delusions: "It's the wind and sea you hear, Nat, Please!" (709). Similarly, when he supposedly sees green water and gold in the imaginary treasure chest, Nat commands his sister to "see how the light changes! Green and gold!" to which she responds, "Only the moonlight, Nat. It hasn't changed. Be quiet, dear, it's nothing" (709). In transferring the realistic perspective from Nat to Sue, O'Neill again switches the spectators' visual allegiance. But he soon qualifies even Sue's perspective by filling the room with colors from Bartlett and Nat's vision, belying the spectators' newfound alignment with the objective sister. Nat commands Sue (in place of Bartlett commanding Nat) to "look" at the water filling the room. He would appear legitimately insane if not for O'Neill's stage directions, which support Nat's perspective: "A dense green glow floods slowly in rhythmic waves like a liquid into the room—as of great depths of the sea faintly penetrated by light" (709). No longer a passive force only affecting the always-gazing Bartlett or symbolizing a poetic sailor longing, the dreamy sea essence, previously exiled to the outdoors, crosses the border from exterior to interior. Accordingly, the sea's antagonism erases the boundary between fantasy and reality, suggesting "the inability of the characters to see clearly, their wish to live in a dream world" (Törnqvist, Playwright's 59). Its encroachment marks the very dramatization of overriding subjectivity—Nat's human will to partake in the delusions of treasure trumps his visual objectivity. However, the audience now finds itself in a precarious position. The supposedly mad Nat provides the only vision available to the audience, forcing it to accept the character's questionable sea-fantasy perspective or declare itself as insane as him.

O'Neill does not cease at the light-and-color show, however. Against a soundtrack of Sue's escalating cries begging Nat to return to his senses, the ship crewmen arrive literally onstage as ghosts:

The forms of Silas Horne, Cates, and Jimmy Kanaka rise noiselessly into the room from the stairs. The last two carry heavy inlaid chests. [. . .] All are in their bare feet. Water drips from their soaked and rotten clothes. Their hair is matted, intertwined with slimy strands of seaweed. Their eyes, as they glide silently into the room, stare frightfully wide at nothing. Their flesh in the green light has the suggestion of decomposition. Their bodies sway limply, nervelessly, rhythmically as if to the pulse of long swells of the deep sea. (710)

Not by coincidence within a play dramatizing the conflicts of visual perception, O'Neill cements the apparitions' surreality foremost through their eyes' blankness. If the green light blurred the division between inside and out, reality and dream, the physical entrance of these sea creatures erases the boundaries entirely. The dialogue favors Sue's perception of reality while the images support Nat's. In this specific scene, their opposing perspectives stand side by side onstage without O'Neill providing an obvious answer as to which one represents the play's reality. Critics either dismiss the sight of the decomposing bodies as "an effect that is elaborately grotesque" (Bogard 101) or justifiably find it a "melodramatic joke" (Brietzke 104). O'Neill himself attests that he intended the muddling blend of subjectivity and objectivity to disable viewers: "This play presumes that everybody is mad but the girl [Sue]. [. . .] I want to see whether it's possible to make an audience go mad too" (qtd. in Bogard 103). He later deemed it "an experiment in treating the audience as insane" (qtd. in Clark 62-63). He advances beyond Fog's unresolved, climactic moment of conflicting perspectives by expanding that play's final perceptual irreconcilability into an entire play. In place of Fog's brief, closing conversation in which the Businessman and the Poet presume the rescue officer delusional for hearing the dead boy cry, O'Neill spends the greater part of Cross exploring, and again not solving, the notion of contradictory perceptions. When he later rewrote the play as the four-act Gold (1920), the ghosts never appeared onstage, instead remaining figments of the captain's and Nat's imaginations. But in the condensed Where the Cross Is Made, O'Neill allows himself to distill the theatricality and amplify the short form's mood to dethrone absolute perception.

In his two major, full-length sea plays of the same period, O'Neill also portrays the sea as capable of single-handedly changing perspective. While O'Neill may not obscure the audience's viewpoint as much as he did in the one-act plays, he still questions discordant observations and the validity of individual perception against impending reality. In Beyond the Horizon (1918), O'Neill continues to demystify any idealism of the landless world. As in Fog when the gross reality (dead bodies, a threatening iceberg) emerges slowly from the mystical fog and in Cross when the moonlight draws back to reveal nothing more than two insane dreamers, Horizon's characters learn the false enticements of the sea. Andrew returns from his time abroad years later only to render his brother Robert's sea romance a myth: "[T]here was so much dirty work [. . .] I remember thinking about you at the worst of it, and saying to myself: `This'd cure Rob of them ideas of his about the beautiful sea, if he could see it.'" (620). According to Andrew, the "real" ocean life amounts to nothing more than a drifting dump yard. Andrew emphasizes his sight of deglamorized reality; if only Robert could see the drudgery of sea living, then he would surrender his illusions. Similarly when "Anna Christie's" (1920) sea virgin Anna falls under a spell at the mere sight of fog, her father Chris attempts to negate her newfound entrancement with the sea: "Fog's vorst one of her [the sea's] dirty tricks [. . .]. And dis ain't real sea. You only see nice part" (979-80). While Anna claims the sea's airs have made her "feel clean, somehow" (982), Chris blames "dat ole davil sea" (981) for the deaths of his father, two brothers, and two sons, all of whom died in the ocean, and for his mother's subsequent death from grief. Moreover, as Anna describes the fog's otherworldly beauty, shipwreck survivor Mat Burke, limping shipmates by his side and eyes "bloodshot and wild from sleeplessness" (984), arrives through the fog. Again, O'Neill puts forth a wistful idea of the open water only to undercut it soon after with contrary talk and ghastly images of the real sea. The subjective dreamers, Robert and Anna, face off against the objective mouthpieces, Andrew and Chris, who claim to have witnessed the sea's evils with their own eyes. As always, O'Neill will not lend total credence to either view.

That Where the Cross Is Made turned out to be O'Neill's final one-act play of the sea proves fitting. Pushing the limits of theatrical atmosphere and undermining the audience's perceptions via blatant confusion may have been as far as O'Neill could have taken the abbreviated form. Though he preserves his sea setting and debate about perspective in Beyond the Horizon and "Anna Christie," he wanes from toying with audiences and genre. They stand as two of his most proficient but least challenging plays from the early era. Soon, however, O'Neill would launch himself into a period of expressionist experimentation. Even as he gradually took his drama permanently inland, he maintained his tyro plays' challenges of audience and character perception. For instance, The Hairy Ape's (1921) opening scene in an ocean liner's cramped forecastle and second scene on a promenade deck under a flood of sunshine denies spectators and characters an engagement with the moonlit, fog-heavy ocean waters of the early sea plays. He re-imagines his argument about perception by dividing two sea-set experiences, Yank with his grunting co-workers down below and Mildred the luxury passenger up above, and exploring the consequences of those two worlds, those two perspectives, colliding. Meanwhile, when The Emperor Jones's (1920) remote, literal tom-toms transform into the internal race of Jones's heart, O'Neill further theatricalizes his early experiments contrasting an objective reality with the subjective instability of perception. The sea itself appears in the other non-Glencairn one-acts as Warnings (1913), Ile (1917), The Rope (1918), and the epic, three-part Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). But not until his late-career masterwork Long Day's Journey into Night (1941) does the sea fully reclaim its place as an emblem of illusionistic nostalgia. O'Neill finds himself largely concerned with perception in that play as well, in what Harold Bloom deems a "grim ballet of looks" (Bloom xii). The central negotiation of perspective manifests itself in the divide between past and present, the foghorn juxtaposing James Tyrone's dreamy memory of horizonless life and endless possibility with the reality of the family's confined, present-day stagnancy. Fog and Where the Cross Is Made both foreshadow this false romanticization of the sea but more importantly telegraph O'Neill's endless shifting of reliable perception within a large fraction of his works. His dramaturgy is finally one worthy of the sea tide, advancing into the focus of onshore viewers only to retreat immediately towards the sea's elusive mass of picturesque mysticism.      

WORKS CITED

Bloom, Harold. "Foreword." A Long Day's Journey into Night. By Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Harold Bloom. 1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

Clark, Barrett Harper. Eugene O'Neill. New York: R.M. McBride, 1927.

Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.

O'Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays 1913-1920. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 1988.

Pfister, Joel. Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Törnqvist, Egil. A Drama of Souls. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.

_____. A Playwright's Theatre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.