At Harvard, O’Neill completed three plays and collaborated on a fourth. Of these, The Sniper, in one act, and The Personal Equation, in four, survive. The others were The Dear Doctor, a one-act comedy based on a short story O’Neill later discovered to have been pirated from a vaudeville sketch, and Balshazzar, a Biblical drama in six scenes which he wrote with a fellow student named Colin Ford. Immediately after leaving Harvard, and still under Baker’s influence, he wrote a pantomime, Atrocity, and two one-act comedies, The G.A.M., whose subject was the I.W.W., A Knock at the Door, and the sole surviving work from this period, a four-act satire, Now I Ask You. Also showing signs of Baker’s teaching is a scenario probably completed in the spring of 1917, entitled The Reckoning.

Each of the extant plays has a strong narrative line, is scrupulously plotted, establishes strong “situations,” based on sudden disclosures, theatrical confrontations and surprising turns of plot. The dialogue is developed with care and with some attention to its “beauty.” O’Neill has been at pains to provide each work with exciting “curtains,” and has striven toward situational ironies that, however, lie at a far remove from the ironic world view he had tried to formulate in The Web.

The Sniper is perhaps closest to his beginning work. It tells of a Belgian peasant, Rougon, whose family has been killed by invading German armies. In sorrow and rage he becomes a sniper, but is caught and executed. The story of the small man struggling in a web of circumstance is reminiscent of that of The Web, but the play rides heavily on its combination of gunfire and lamentation and seeks to develop a strong coup de théâtre from Rougon’s discovery that his wife and his son’s fiancée, whom he had thought safe, have been caught in a German cross fire. The work is little more than an anecdote, illustrative of the atrocity of war, intended to appeal to an audience’s horror at the Prussian “rape” of Belgium. The Provincetown Players produced The Sniper once, in February, 1917; thereafter, like O’Neill’s other “war” plays, The Movie Man and Shell­Shock, it was advisedly forgotten.

O’Neill’s attempt to duplicate the ending of Ghosts leaves everything to be desired, yet the drawn-out reconciliation scene is precisely the sort of “situation” Baker advocated. Attempts are made to follow such pieces of Baker’s advice as to work in exposition naturally, e.g., “Tell me about (your father) I’m interested. We’ve been together for nearly half a year now and you hardly ever mentioned him except to say he was second-engineer on the San Francisco.” (I,10) O’Neill has tried to make his dialogue clear, in character and beautiful:

That O’Neill was not always able to sustain such a level of eloquence is suggested by Tom’s reply:

Dialect was another of Baker’s ways of beautifying dialogue. Aside from several forms of American English, O’Neill writes for people speaking in dialects reflecting their backgrounds in Germany, Scotland, Ireland, Holland and Great Britain, including Cockney. Although he handles the talk of the crew with a sense of authority, the effect is not always felicitous, as in this speech of an I.W.E. chief:

So far as the rules permitted, O’Neill tossed into the play much that appears to have been of momentary concern to him, but very little that was to become of serious interest.* The ideas of Shaw and Nietzsche, together with a wide variety of hazily understood anarchist pronouncements, can be traced in the pages. For example, at one moment, Olga relies on Thus Spake Zarathustra to express her hope for her child: “I’ll bring up our child with a soul freed from all adorations of Gods and governments if I have to live alone on a mountain top to do it.” (III,8) Or again, a version of Shaw is put into an anarchist’s mouth: “At the end of my supposititious war of manly extermination there will be ten or twenty womanly women for every unmanly man who has refused to die on the field of honor. Yet breeding must go on. The women, above all, will demand it. The new race must be created to enjoy the new freedom.” (I,18) Such talk vies with melodrama to capture the audience’s interest.

In retrospect, it is possible to see that some elements of the play— involuntary gestures, really—will prove serviceable when couched in sharply different forms. The line “The soul of man is an uninhabited house…” (I,13) foreshadows faintly the Mannon mansion in Mourning Becomes Electra, just as Tom’s comment about “the contrast between us grimy stokers and the first class cabin people lolling in their deck-chairs” (I,20) anticipates The Hairy Ape. In a comedy scene between Perkins and his housekeeper, there is a suggestion of the relationship between Chris and Marty Owen in “Anna Christie,” and Perkins’s love for his engines hints at Reuben Light’s love of the dynamo: “I was lonely—after (my wife) died. That’s why I came to love the engines so.” (II,13) His seeking out the engines as a love object may even suggest in the dimmest outline Ephraim Cabot’s groping movement toward the barn in Desire Under the Elms after he tells his wife of his loneliness.