The One-Act Plays of Eugene O’Neill

Short sketches from a master playwright

Eugene O’Neill

One-act plays are the short stories of drama. These are brief stage plays lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his full-length plays like The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, and The Iceman Cometh, but he also wrote 21 one-act plays. I don’t know if any book has ever been devoted exclusively to these short plays, but they can be found in complete-works collections of O’Neill’s writings, or in the three volumes on O’Neill published by the Library of America. In O’Neill’s day, one-act plays would have been staged for theatre festivals and variety nights, which served as opportunities for up-and-coming playwrights to establish a reputation and perhaps win some awards. Nowadays, one-act plays seem relegated to high school and college students performing them in theatrical competitions. While you are unlikely to ever see most of these short plays performed on an actual stage, they are worth a read. O’Neill is one playwright whose works come across well on the printed page. His well-crafted dialogue and detailed and descriptive stage directions often read like prose fiction, calling to mind the works of novelist contemporaries like John Steinbeck or William Faulkner. 

With the exception of the final play on this list, Hughie, all of these works were written early in O’Neill’s career, before he achieved fame and critical acclaim with plays like Beyond the Horizon (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and The Emperor Jones. The first four plays listed below comprise a series with recurring characters, the crew of the ship Glencairn. Many of O’Neill’s early plays deal with nautical travel or the lives of sailors, either at sea or on shore. Seafaring tales were more popular in the early twentieth century than they are today, and the genre allowed O’Neill to deliver popular dramas to the audience while honing his craft towards more mature sailor plays like Anna Christie. In the later plays on this list, one can see the development of O’Neill’s interest in dysfunctional families and their psychological problems, which would lead to later, greater plays like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Through no fault of O’Neill’s, many of his one-act plays present scenes that will seem very familiar from films of the last hundred years, so familiar that they often come across as predictable and clichéd now. It’s hard to tell, however, how they would have been received by theatre audiences a century ago.

Bound East for Cardiff (1914) - 3.5 stars
The first of a series of four one-act plays set on the ship Glencairn. This one presents a death scene in the ship’s forecastle. One crewman lies dying, injured from a fall, while his shipmates converse around him.

In the Zone (1917) - 3 stars
Set during World War I, the ship Glencairn is carrying munitions and has entered “the war zone.” The crewmen are suspicious that one of their own, Smitty, may be a German spy. Not badly written, but utterly predictable to anyone who’s seen enough old war films.

The Long Voyage Home (1918) - 4 stars
Men from the Glencairn stop in a waterfront tavern in London, where the barkeep and his friends hope to shanghai an unsuspecting drunk into servitude on another vessel. This is a familiar scene from literature and film—such as the nautical writings of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example—but well done here.

Moon of the Caribbees (1918) - 2 stars
The Glencairn is docked in the West Indies. The crewmen wait for some Black women to show up bringing liquor and sex. Drinking and dancing ensues. The women represent the exotic temptations of the nautical life and wanderlust amid the tropics, but the depiction is racist and the plot is pointless for the most part.

A Wife for a Life (1913) - 2 stars
Two partners work a gold mine in Arizona. The younger of the two gets a telegram from an old sweetheart summoning him home. This leads to a conclusion that is not at all surprising. The dialogue is bogged down with a lot of clumsy explanation.

The Web (1913) - 3 stars
A New York prostitute with a child lives at the mercy of her abusive boyfriend/pimp. At first this reads almost like a piece of muckraking realism, but it gets very heavy-handedly melodramatic towards the end. Again, this is like a scene you’ve seen in countless movies.

Thirst (1913) - 3.5 stars
Three survivors on a life raft are dying of hunger and thirst and fighting off insanity. There’s some racism here, not uncommon for the era, but it is a decently written melodrama. This reads as if it were written for film because the set directions seem as if they would be impossible to execute on a stage.

Recklessness (1913) - 2 stars
An ugly marriage scene, perhaps foreshadowing O’Neill’s later dysfunctional family dramas but not very successfully. A rich older man with a lovely young wife finds out she is cheating on him with their chauffeur. The depiction of the woman is deliberately cruel, indicative of a woman-is-the-root-of-all-evil mindset that plagues some of O’Neill’s other plays.

Warnings (1913) - 3 stars
A telegraph operator for a steamship discovers that he is losing his hearing. He decides to sail on one last voyage, even though he knows his deafness might endanger the ship and its crew. This features a good family scene up front, worthy of O’Neill’s better efforts, but a pretty straightforward, expected ending.

Fog (1914) - 2.5 stars
Another lifeboat drama. Two men talk while a poor woman hugs her dead child. One of the men is a businessman and one a poet, and they carry with them all of the clichés that go along with those professions. This play is ambitious for its supernatural ending.

Abortion (1914) - 4.5 stars
A college baseball star cheats on his fiancée and gets another girl pregnant. His father helps him pay for an abortion. When the girl dies, her brother comes looking for revenge. Surprisingly dark and risqué subject matter for the time. 

The Movie Man (1914) - 2 stars
A comedy set in the Mexican Revolution. A movie director has a contract with a rebel general to film all of his battles. The general is a thinly veiled parody of Pancho Villa. The humor isn’t very funny, and the depiction of the Mexicans is a bit racist.

The Sniper (1915) - 4.5 stars
Set in Belgium during World War I, in a cottage destroyed by shells. A peasant mourns over his dead son, a soldier killed by the Prussians. The peasant vows vengeance against the Germans, but a priest tries to dissuade him from rash violence. Brief but powerful.

Before Breakfast (1916) - 2 stars
A trashy alcoholic shrew of a woman bitches at her husband, a poet (who is offstage, never seen). Reading as if it were written to punish some ex-girlfriend, this is another woman-as-the-root-of-all-evil story, yet it still might be provide a meaty monologue for some character actress.

Ile (1917) - 3.5 stars
In the arctic, a whaling boat is blocked by ice. The captain refuses to turn back until his ship is filled with whale oil (“the ile”). The crew, starving and overworked, threaten mutiny. The captain’s wife, also along for the ride, pleads with her husband to turn the ship back towards home as the voyage weighs on her sanity.

The Rope (1918) - 4 stars
A dysfunctional family drama, heavy on the white trash. A bitter old man is losing his sanity. He keeps a noose hung in his barn so that his estranged son can someday return and hang himself with it. Meanwhile, his daughter and her husband scheme to get the old man’s farm and money. A good surprise ending.

Shell Shock (1918) - 2.5 stars
A World War I hero suffers from PTSD after some horrific trench warfare, as evidenced by his compulsive obsession for hoarding cigarettes. This feels a bit like an after-school special with a rather simplistic take on its issue. It hints at a bleak and cynical ending that would have risen it above the mediocre but ultimately backs out in favor of a crowd-pleasing expression of patriotism.

The Dreamy Kid (1918) - 3 stars
A blaxploitation film in one-act play form. An elderly Black woman lies ill on her death bed. She waits for her grandson Dreamy to show up before she succumbs to death. Dreamy, however, is a hoodlum on the run from the law. The dialogue is penned in heavy Black accents, but otherwise this isn’t noticeably racist.

Where the Cross is Made (1918) - 3.5 stars
A former sea captain, obsessed with a buried treasure, is losing his sanity. He has built a replica of a ship’s cabin on the roof of his house and confined himself to it. His son wants to get him committed to a mental institution. 

Exorcism (1919) - 2 stars
Two roommates live a drunken existence in a squalid New York apartment. One is depressed over his impending divorce and considers suicide. It’s hard to see the point in this one.

Hughie (written in 1941, first performed in 1959) - 3 stars
A boisterous professional gambler lives in a run-down hotel in New York. In the wee hours of the morning, he accosts the new night clerk on duty and bombards him with conversation. Mostly, he regales the new kid with tales of his night clerk predecessor, the recently deceased Hughie. Written later in O’Neill’s career, this is a fine character study, but rather devoid of plot.