Early Plays

The Wooster Group, has invited Richard Maxwell of New York City Players to direct O’Neill’s four Glencairn plays: Bound East for Cardiff (1914), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917) and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918). Early Plays takes O’Neill’s tales of sailors on and off the ocean as a base to explore themes of longing and eternity. Dark episodes showing the underside of turn-of-the-century maritime life–brawls, dances and carousing–are staged with a quotidian grace allowing these simple stories to resonate emotionally.

Elizabeth LeCompte, director of The Wooster Group, pinpointed Maxwell as the director to give these plays an inspired “remix,” realizing O’Neill’s beautifully romantic text in a sparse, modern, yet still mythic place.