A wireless operator who is losing his hearing is forced by poverty to take a job he can no longer perform: that of deciphering Morse Code transmissions for a luxury oceanliner. His total loss of hearing is ultimately discovered when the ship hits a derelict.
Thus goes the plot of the one-act play "Warnings," one of Eugene O'Neill's lesser-known works. A reading of the melodrama-at-sea will be presented by the Playwrights Theater of New York at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 16 (what would be the playwright's 109th birthday), in the Calhoun College master's house, 189 Elm St.
In "Warnings," which has been compared to a "Twilight Zone" episode or an Alfred Hitchcock film by student audiences, O'Neill also pens his first portrait of a father who is forced to work to the detriment of his family: a theme that surfaces again in "Long Day's Journey Into Night."
The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by O'Neill at Yale, a group of University faculty, students and staff dedicated to presenting works by the author, who is the United States' only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, as well as the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Yale, the only degree of any sort held by O'Neill during his lifetime. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is also cosponsoring the reading.
Written in 1914, less than two years after the Titanic went down, "Warnings" is the second of 13 plays that O'Neill set at or around the sea. His first, "Thirst," was read at the Beinecke Library last spring.
The Playwrights Theater of New York is currently in the midst of its project to present chronological readings of the entire O'Neill canon.