Theatre in Review: Beyond the Horizon (Irish Repertory Theatre)

	Wrenn Schmidt and Lucas Hall. Photo Carol Rosegg

The word on Eugene O'Neill is that his early plays -- really, the first 30 years or so of his career -- consist largely of unproduceable one-acts and arty experiments in the expressionistic spirit of the times, and it's his twilight-era masterpieces, beginning with The Iceman Cometh in 1939, that really matter. (Ah, Wilderness!, written in 1933, gets a well-deserved exemption.) For years, I didn't question this -- how many revivals of Dynamo have you seen? -- but, lately, Irish Repertory Theatre has been giving the lie to this idea. The company's revival of The Hairy Ape, which I didn't see, was well-received, and, in reviving The Emperor Jones, it did very well by a play that I would have assumed was a minefield of staging problems. Now comes Irish Rep's Beyond the Horizon, and I'm beginning to wonder if we really know O'Neill at all.

A Broadway success in 1920 and an early Pulitzer Prize winner, Beyond the Horizon put O'Neill on the map, and, as such, is likely to be the sort of piece that is doomed to live in the shadow of the author's signature works. But Ciarán O'Reilly's production reveals that O'Neill's vision -- relentless, remorseless, and unwilling to spare a single soul -- was pretty much in place at this very early date.

As is so often the case in O'Neill's plays, rural Connecticut is the setting, and the characters are trapped in a net of family obligations; it's a world where acts of self-sacrifice are indistinguishable from acts of self-destruction. We are introduced to the Mayo brothers, who live on a farm with their mother and father. Robert, a bookish dreamer who has been dogged by ill health all his life, is about to leave for three years of service on his uncle's steamer as it covers the globe. He's a typical O'Neill protagonist -- weak, impractical, and filled with inchoate longings. The trip has been reluctantly deemed necessary by his family as a way of making a man out of him, but Robert, who, unlike his brother, Andy, has no interest in farming, aches to see the world.

But, on the eve of his departure, Robert discovers that Ruth, the young woman who lives on the adjoining farm, is in love with him. For years, he has loved Ruth from afar, believing, as did their families, that she was meant for Andy. Suddenly, everyone's plans are turned upside down. Robert declares his intention to marry Ruth; Andy, devastated, goes to sea in his brother's place.

These decisions, made in haste and in the heat of passion, lead to disaster for all. Under Robert's inexpert guidance, the farm quickly fails and his marriage to Ruth just as quickly sours. The arrival of a daughter, Mary, proves to be no help, with the little girl serving mostly as a proxy in her parents' battles. Ruth becomes carried away with romantic fantasies about Andy -- but when he returns, full of plans for his future, she experiences the rudest of awakenings. Things worsen dramatically from there, but, given the play's relative unfamiliarity, I'll say no more, except to add that the action builds to a wrenching three-way confrontation that is among the more powerful passages in O'Neill's canon.

Beyond the Horizon is unmistakably the work of a young writer, and most of O'Neill's quirks -- most especially his penchant for making dramatic points over and over -- are present and accounted for. And in the early scenes, at least, O'Reilly's company doesn't seem fully at home with the author's words -- which, admittedly, can be stilted at times. But it's impossible not to marvel at the author's skill at putting forth a terrible view of life while convincing us that it is nothing more or less than the truth. Even at this early stage, he excelled at showing how a young innocent like Robert, who sincerely believes he is making everyone happy with his choices, is in fact committing an act of self-betrayal that will bring misery to everyone he professes to love.

And, as the action moves at a measured pace from one terrible loss to the next, focusing ever more intently on the Robert-Ruth-Andy triangle, Beyond the Horizon builds in power. (It's an indicator of O'Neill's skill that, even so early in his career, one of the play's saddest events is revealed in a throwaway line that, nevertheless, earned a murmur of distress from the audience at the performance I attended.)

All three lead performers have brutally effective moments. Lucas Hall's transformation from a starry-eyed youth to a grizzled failure, weighed down by responsibilities, is charted in unsparing detail. As Ruth, Wrenn Schmidt's face hardens before our eyes as one love after another proves to be a bitter disappointment. Rod Brogan skillfully manages the changes in Andy's character, beginning as a guileless farmhand and evolving into a man of affairs, his air of prosperity hiding a terrible secret.

Among the supporting players, some of whom at times seem a little too contemporary, Johanna Lester makes a solid impression as Andy and Robert's mother, her face worn with worry, and Patricia Conolly offers a sharply etched comic cameo as Ruth's mother, a wheelchair-bound biddy whose tart opinions are always delivered with the Sign of the Cross and an upward gaze toward heaven.

The production also benefits from an inventive design apporach. Hugh Landwehr's setting is defined by a frequently bare stage deck, with pointed upstage and downstage edges that tip up to create an image like the deck of a ship. He surrounds the action with abstract drops filled with J.M.W. Turner-style swatches of color, which, under the transformative effect of Brian Nason's lighting, change from gunmetal gray and matte yellow to an eruption of vivid reds, blues, and greens -- changes that reflect the characters' shifting emotional states. The costumes, by Linda Fisher and Jessica Barrios, are perfectly solid, as is the sound design by M. Florian Staab.

Not every single thing works; the decision to present Beyond the Horizon in two acts, not three as O'Neill intended, has a slightly undermining effect. The play is written to reveal the characters at intervals of four and five years, and I think it would work better if the original structure was honored. But there's no question that three fine young actors are revealing that, even in this early work, O'Neill was a mature artist, one of the very few American playwrights with an authentic sense of tragedy. --David Barbour