By HEDY WEISS

Chalk it up as the first great revelation of the Goodman Theatre's current festival devoted to a global exploration of the plays of Eugene O'Neill and the many different ways in which his work is being imagined in the 21st century. The production of "Zona de Guerra" ("In the War Zone") that opened Wednesday night -- the first of three of O'Neill's early plays, all set on the sea, and all being presented by Brazil's Companhia Triptal -- is an example of the most sublime theatrical witchcraft. The fact that the Goodman engagement also marks the troupe's first performances outside Brazil is only an additional reason to celebrate.

Written between 1914 and 1917 and inspired by the playwright's experiences as a young merchant seaman, the one-act sea plays conjured both that sense of haunted human souls and the elements of expressionistic style that would become O'Neill trademarks. But you also get the feeling that Companhia Triptal seized on this play -- the story of a ship full of men who are ferrying ammunition across the Atlantic during World War I and are terrified of being blown up by mines or torpedoes -- as a timely commentary on what can happen to people caught up in in a war on terror.

From the moment you enter the Owen Theatre for the hourlong "Zona," you begin to sense that strange, rocking, eerily unstable movement of a ship riding the waves of a vast ocean. Suspended portholes swing like pendulums. The show's sound design is brilliant, with the bellow of strange horns permeating the fog, and the creaky expansion and contraction of wood beams filling the air. The men, bunked down in close quarters, have the instincts of feral animals who have been locked in a cage far too long.

The play begins with one seaman's all-too-vivid nightmare that is evoked entirely through movement and stagecraft, and this makes the unspooling of the subsequent story -- about how that man's nightmare seamlessly morphs into horrific reality -- easier to follow, with the use of projected English supertitles (the dialogue is in Portuguese) distracting but not intolerable. O'Neill's cautionary tale is simple: The sailors are terrified they might be killed at seas and they begin to entertain paranoid notions that one among them -- a brooding, solitary fellow who guards his suitcase -- might be a German spy. He becomes the terrifying enemy within and is subjected to the most brutal treatment before the truth is revealed.

The nine actors, with their remarkable hair and faces, and their wild assortment of bodies, ages, voices and temperaments, move like a crazy herd of dancers. (They experienced something of an 85-degree drop in air temperature upon arrival here from Brazil.) Andre Garolli's direction is masterful in every respect. And O'Neill's tale is nothing short of shattering.