By CHRIS JONES

There are some mighty salty dogs in Companhia Triptal's visceral production of "In the Zone," the guttural Eugene O'Neill "sea play" from 1917. Actually, salty doesn't fully capture the bark of these rather terrifying Brazilian actors. This is one feral pack.

Perchance these visitors to Chicago—part of the Goodman Theatre's provocative exploration of the international impact of O'Neill—prepared for their first entrance Wednesday night by wandering around outside on Dearborn Street and comparing the feel to that of a Brazilian summer. That would explain why you can see the whites of everyone's eyes.

Indeed, Andre Garolli's ensemble production is a very compelling way to pass 70 minutes or so in the theater. It's a stylized, intense, overtly physical concept wherein very masculine, hyped-up men re-create the sweat, angst, shifting allegiances and pervasive paranoia that inevitably arises when you confine a group of males in close quarters for a protracted period of time.

This is a show that concentrates on a sensual essence, as distinct from an intellectual reality.

O'Neill's simply plotted drama concerns the sudden suspicions of the crew of the SS Glencairn that a German spy is in their midst. But in Garolli's hands, the evocative imagery of persecution and torture sends your head on a global voyage from Guantanamo to Jerusalem to one of those out-of-control hazing rituals that many of us males either carried out or, God help us, endured. Though the work involves stylized movement—even body sculpture—and is performed with hyperventilating intensity, there is not a whiff of the inauthentic. And the bloody stage violence is staged so well it has you squirming in your seat.

You do have to deal with a projected English text accompanying actors performing this English-language play in their native Portuguese. It's hard to watch both at once and the spatial connection of the two elements isn't ideal.

And I very much wish the Goodman had come up with a more imaginative way to present Triptal's "sea play" triptych than doing just one of the plays for a week over a three-week period. Since these works are all short and so closely related, it would have been much more powerful to let Chicagoans experience Garolli's collective interpretation of all of them, all at once.

But if you are partaking of the O'Neill experience at the Goodman, this arresting piece of international theater is not to be missed. It could be more different than "The Emperor Jones." The Wooster Group's cold, nuanced, technologically precise show was designed to expose the social (re-)constructions of the writer; Triptal takes you right inside the belly of the whale.