"Early Plays" by O'Neill From Wooster Group at St. Ann's The weary sameness of life at sea has taken its toll on the crew members of the S.S. Glencairn. Even drunk, desperate and quarrelsome, these sullen salts rarely raise or otherwise vary their voices. They sound pretty much the same whether they're anguished or angry or excited or on their deathbeds. The monotony of a sailor's lot has driven them, it would seem, into monotones. Let's not rush, though, to blame that ol" devil sea for their condition. Their director had something to do with it too. That would be Richard Maxwell, the celebrated experimental theater auteur. Mr. Maxwell and his New York City Players have joined forces with another towering bastion of the avant-garde, the Wooster Group, to present "Early Plays" by Eugene O'Neill at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. While both companies have their own unmistakable signatures - among the most easily identified and influential in theater today - the show that opened on Wednesday night is mostly a Richard Maxwell production. No Wooster-fied text-splintering or mixed-media rhapsodies here. The style is stripped-down, straightforward and somnolent in the classic Maxwell manner, but without - I'm sorry to report - the usual Maxwell impact. Since the late 1990s, with works like "House," "Boxing 2000" and "The End of Reality," Mr. Maxwell has systematically drained the surface tension from traditionally tense, highly dramatic contexts (espionage, prize fighting, street violence). He has aspired, he has said, to a nonjudgmental neutrality. It's an approach that, at its best, makes us listen to clichés with new ears and hear the sincerity within them. In theory this style could be helpful in addressing the plays Mr. Maxwell has taken on here: "Moon of the Caribbees," "Bound East for Cardiff" and "The Long Voyage Home." O'Neill wrote these one-acts early in his career, drawing from his years spent working on steamers, and they made his name as a pioneering playwright. But while these works, which all portray men from a ship called the Glencairn, have a raw poetry and awareness of human isolation that anticipate the mature O'Neill, they are still partly shackled by the conventions of 19th-century melodrama. Performing them with ardor and earnestness often only amplifies their creaks. With "Early Plays" Mr. Maxwell is asking us to look for the distilled essence beneath the hoary crust, to see past a century's accumulation of barnacles. The governing aesthetic, both visual and aural, is one of straight lines against a blank space. O'Neill's words are spoken almost robotically by a cast that mixes Wooster veterans (Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos) and Maxwell regulars (Jim Fletcher, Brian Mendes). The Spartan set by Jim Clayburgh and Elizabeth LeCompte (the Wooster Group's longtime leader) is adapted from their productions of O'Neill's "Hairy Ape" and "Emperor Jones," but without the sophisticated, fragmenting technological devices used in those interpretations. So what we're left with is effectively an empty canvas, relieved by the punctuation of ropes, wires, poles and pulleys. When the actors take their places in this pristine environment for the "Moon of the Caribbees," the play that opens the production, they register as an enhancement of the set's plain geometry, integers in some vast, abstract equation. It's a quietly breathtaking effect, and it tallies with O'Neill's statement that in this play the hero was not a person but "the spirit of the sea - a big thing." "Moon," which depicts a clumsy, drunken revel on the Glencairn, docked off a West Indies island, was revolutionary in 1918 for its lack of traditional plot. Despite its gritty physical detail and rough language, it's impressionistic. And the affectless delivery of the dialogue here could be said to reflect how human concerns seem small in an immense, uncaring universe. That feeling is captured in part by the haunting native song that emanates from the shore, rendered here as an unending subliminal murmur. Bobby McElver did the excellent sound design. And there's bracing wit in the contrast provided by the sailors" crude, boisterous chanteys and the wonderfully clunky dance they engage in with the rum-selling island women. At first you almost don't mind that the actors aren't on the same level, or even on the same page. Ms. Valk (who was brilliant in the title role of the Wooster "Emperor Jones"), as one of the women, and Mr. Fliakos, as a British sailor, bring a polished cadence to their line readings that somehow suggests a genuine emotional energy stifled by habit and artifice. But in their willful flatness many of the other performers come across as hapless on the one hand, or camp on the other. Much of the dialogue is written in assorted dialects, and it's given exaggerated phonetic pronunciation here that jars more than it was presumably intended to.