If you need a refresher on the disaster look here.
The play is a little audacious, I mean the stage directions indicated a liferaft bobbing on the ocean with shark fins circling. In fact, O'Neill keeps referring to the shark fins gathering.
The three people aboard are a gentleman, a dancer and a black sailor who sits quietly the whole time. Eugene O'Neill played him in the first production of the play.
A whole lot of philosophizin' goes on. The Gentleman cries out "God, God what a joke to play on us!"
But the real heartbeat is in the details. The Dancer discusses how she saw the captain shooting himself before the ship went down. The Gentleman remembers how he was watching the Dancer in the ship's bar and also how he saw a woman eaten by a shark right in front of him.
A really uncomfortable and grotesque scene comes when the Dancer, convinced that the sailor has water horded away, straightens out her clothes and tries to seduce the soldier offering her body to him:
"Are you so stupid that you do not know what I mean? Look! I am offering myself to you! I am kneeling before you. I who have always had men kneel to me!"
She is repelled by the sailor, and the whole scene, despite the overly dramatic dialogue, is pathetic and hard to read, or watch I imagine. It is also cruelly ironic when we find out in the end that the sailor will take her body in quite a different way.
However, near the end of the play we will see a glimpse of something still years to come: the image of Mary Tyrone in her final appearance in Long Day's Journey:
(The Dancer is lying in huddled heap moaning to herself.
Suddenlyshe jumps to feet. All her former weakness seems quite gone. She stands swaying a little with the roll of the raft. Her eyes have a terrible glare in them. They seem bursting out of her head...
The Dancer:(smoothing her dress over her hips and looking before her as if in the mirror) Quick Marie! You are so slow tonight. I will be late. Did you not hear the bell? I am the next on. Did he send any flowers tonight...
