The play that made the dramatist

Another, “Before Breakfast,” a scorching work involving the suicide of an impoverished young New York husband, is still done with regularity.
However, it was “Beyond the Horizon,” written in 1918 and produced in 1920, which brought the Irish-American Nobel laureate his first resounding success as a playwright. For one thing, it won him his first Pulitzer Prize and made him a Broadway name.
Seldom produced today, the play is still of significant interest as an indicator of what lay ahead in the astonishing O’Neill career.
There are distinct foreshadowings here of “Desire Under the Elms,” “The Great God Brown,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and, to be sure, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
The play’s armature strongly reflects O’Neill’s interest in the writings and the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whose theories were strongly in vogue in the period immediately following World War I. Freud’s popularity almost certainly contributed to the success of “Beyond the Horizon” in its debut production at the Morosco Theatre.
“Beyond the Horizon” is currently being given a modest, clean-limbed, well-cast production by the Boomerang Theatre Company, in residence at Center Stage, NY, where it will run through the 26th of the month.
As always, the play is hampered by an intimidating amount of muzzle-loaded exposition, precisely the sort of information dispensation Thornton Wilder parodied so memorably in the first moments of “The Skin of Our Teeth.”
Connecticut farm boys Rob and Andy Mayo take the stage, reminding each other, for the benefit of the audience of details with which they, as brothers, are already all too familiar.
If this unpretentious production, intelligently directed by Cailin Heffernan, works, which to a large extent it does, much credit is due to the strong work being done by the actors involved in the triangle at the play’s rather rusty heart.
Peter O’Connor is stunning and rock-steady in the tricky, complicated role of Rob, who, unhappy on his father’s small farm, dreams, despite his poor health, of going to sea, in order to discover what lies beyond the horizon he views from the highest hill on the family property.
The role, clearly a slightly self-pitying self-portrait on O’Neill’s part and a distinct precursor of Edmund the younger of the battling, loving brothers of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” contains a fair number of potential actor traps, into none of which the appealing and utterly convincing O’Connor stumbles. He is, without doubt, a young actor to watch.
Equally fine are Justin C. Krauss as the sturdy Andy, and the winsome Jennifer Larkin as Ruth, the girl from the neighboring farm who, in O’Neill’s somewhat contrived plotline, becomes involved with both of the Mayo siblings.
In the well-cast older generation, Ron Sanborn, as James Mayo, the father of the brothers, is effectively and powerfully hot-headed, while Margaret A. Flanagan’s Kate Mayo radiates quiet strength, unspoken understanding, and a strong sense of the time and place in which the action takes place.
In smaller, less crucial roles Peter Morr, Dolores McDougal, Emma Devine Warman and John C. Fitzmaurice are acceptable.
“Beyond the Horizon,” formally described as a “three-act tragedy” is being presented by the Boomerang Theatre Company in two parts, a decision that results in an extremely lengthy first half, and some awkward, time-consuming scene changes, even in a staging as simple as this one, since the action shifts from farm exteriors and domestic interiors and back again several times in the unspooling of its relatively straightforward, but time-spanning plot.
O’Neill’s biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb refer to “Beyond the Horizon” as one of the plays with which the playwright had “shaken the theater world.” That’s a claim that’s just a bit hard to swallow 84 years after the premiere production, considering the creakiness of the work’s storytelling methods and, to a point, the obviousness of its psychological insights.
That said, “Beyond the Horizon” still has validity, particularly when the leading roles are as well-played as they are here by Krauss, Larkin and O’Connor.
Eugene O’Neill’s actor father, James, kept the telegram announcing his son’s first Pulitzer Prize by his bedside as he lay dying in Connecticut. The Gelbs quote him as telling a relative, “I can die happy, because I think Gene is going to be all right.”