Customer Reviews

Beyond the Horizon a Play in Three Acts

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Beyond the Horizon was O'Neill's first major full-length play and its release is considered a significant turning point in the history of American theater. Its main characters are two twentysomething brothers, Rob and Andy, who have both spent their lives on the family farm and have quite opposite dispositions: Andy is excruciatingly practical and hopes for little more in life than to take over the farm and make it successful; whereas Rob is something of a bookish dreamer who hopes to see what life is like "beyond the horizon." He gets this opportunity when his uncle invites him to come along on a three year trip to South America and Asia, but the night before their departure, a woman with whom both Rob and Andy are in love professes her love for Rob, causing Rob to stay behind to marry her while Andy, unable to bear the idea of living alongside the new couple, takes Rob's place on the trip. The bulk of the play deals with the long-term consequences of this one night in which the brothers ignored their callings in life.

As is often the case in O'Neill's plays, the premise is fairly simple and unoriginal and the development of the plot is relatively predictable, but the intensity with which the characters are developed is excellent and truly memorable. We see in Rob the same sort of futile hope that O'Neill would develop so well some years later in The Iceman Cometh, and the despair of the other characters is quite moving. At times, the pathos in the play can almost be over-the-top (and I imagine that in live performances this might be something that the actors have to be all the more careful to avoid), but O'Neill manages to avoid going into the realm of melodrama and create very real, touching characters.

O'Neill would, of course, go on to write many other deeply emotional plays, a number of which are still better known than this one. Beyond the Horizon shows us many of the talents for which O'Neill is now universally recognized, and the almost-universal acclaim that it received upon its 1920 premiere seems equally apt today.

The first O'Neill play performed on Broadway (in 1920), "Beyond the Horizon" is actually the fifth full-length drama in O'Neill's career as a playwright. ("Bread and Butter,""Servitude," "The Personal Equation," and "Now I Ask You" all were completed before 1916, although none of them were performed during O'Neill's lifetime.)

A commercial success and winner of a Pulitzer Prize (the first of four for O'Neill), "Beyond the Horizon" is somewhat jarring to the modern ear in both theatric arrangement and thematic development; it shows a still-green O'Neill struggling to convey his characters' emotional depth and psychological torments in the not-quite-convincing framework of a melodramatic plot.

The problems start in the very first act, when Robert Mayo, a youth inclined to poetry and a life of idleness, is preparing to leave for an apprenticeship at sea with his uncle. In the matter of a few pages, Robert confesses his love for his brother Andrew's childhood sweetheart, Ruth; he casts aside the plans for his voyage and decides to live as a farmer--an occupation he despises; the love-struck couple agree to be married forthwith; and Andrew, in bitterness, assumes Robert's position on the ship and leaves the very next morning for a journey of several years. All in a evening's work. This abbreviated soap opera suffers from a lack of any attempt at dramatic preparation or character development; Ruth, in particular, pretty much walks onto the stage and ecstatically accepts Robert's out-of-the-blue marriage proposal. As O'Neill was to learn later in his career, it takes a much longer play to set up this sort of scenario.

Fortunately, the rest of the play is much better; it focuses on the deterioration of Robert and Ruth's hasty marriage, with Ruth regretting her decision and pining for Andrew's infrequent visits. In these two acts, O'Neill avoids impulsive, life-changing choices and more effectively shows slice-of-life scenes: Ruth's fights with her mother and her indolent husband, Andrew's exultant although brief return, the near-bankruptcy of the farm, and Robert's declining health. Although the play closes with a sentimentality bordering on bathos, these two acts herald the first triumph of one of America's great dramatists.

Beyond the Horizon is the story of 2 very close brothers, Robert and Andrew, who choose opposite paths in life. Each unfortunately, chooses a path better suited for the other. The deeper meaning in this play is what happens to a man's soul when he doesn't follow his dreams.

In 1920, Eugene O'Neill had his breakthrough as a playwright. BtH was his first long play that was produced for the stage, and it won him his first Pulitzer. (His was only the 2nd Pulitzer Prize for drama ever awarded. If one looks through the history of award winners, the competition does not seem to have been overwhelmingly strong.) He had a series of one-act plays staged before, but his longer plays had so far remained unpublished and un-staged. His one- act plays had not been truly remarkable. 'Beyond the Horizon' made it to Broadway.
Two brothers are in love with the same girl. One heart must be broken. The girl is quite clear that she roots for the younger brother, the one who dreams about things beyond the horizon and who wants to go on a long sailing turn with his uncle Dick, captain of the Sunda, bound for Japan and possibly other exciting places. That causes a huge problem for the young man: stay home with the girl, but without a clear future, or live his old dream? The older brother is the homely one, his dream is to run the farm of his father, and marry the girl.
Things go differently. The young men switch their position, the younger one stays and gets married, the older one goes on board. But romantic love turns sour quickly. The dreamer can't run the farm. The girl turns into a nagging wife, imitating her mother. Hopes then turn to the older brother, whose return will fix things... He, in turn, has made a success of his sea-going, but his heart was not in it. He has forgotten the girl though.
The story is about choices, and consequences, and regrets. There are the usual O'Neill conflicts: husband/wife, father/son. The mood is strongly defeatist and the farm goes down badly. The play's strength is the twist of action versus anticipations in the first two acts, but from there on it becomes a little too predictable and dreary in the 3rd.

(As I read the play in the LoA, I can't judge this edition. From experience with other texts in the series I know that it should be the last resort for any text. Take it only if you find no other way to get access!)

The play was not written at all the way it was originally. There is no distinction between speakers and the dialogue is completely mixed and jumbled up so it is hard to follow the story. If you had mentioned in the product description that it was written this way, I would not have bought it. I wasn't satisfied with this product.

The printing of the play must have been done by an elementary school shop class. There were: run-on sentances and paragraphs, mis-spells, no separation between 'character speak' and stage directions - to mention a few. A total waste to money.

I purchased this copy here, at Amazon for my Modern American Drama class. When I opened the book, I was like "ok, looks good", but when I started reading it, it was plagued with so much typos that it looks like a 13 year old could have typed this. I don't recommend buying this copy, buy it from another publisher or something. The play was good but the publisher did a horrible job with the typing. Be Warned!

BEYOND THE HORIZON was Eugene O'Neill's first full-length play. The tale of two siblings who take off on very different and unexpected paths in life, the play explores how fate and our own decisions can doom our lives. Robert and Andrew Mayo have grown up on a farm somewhere in the United States. Robert is the dreamer and intellectual of the two, a lifetime of frailty preventing him from working as a farmer, and he dreams of seeing the world and living in places beyond the small confines of his family's farm. Andrew, however, is a man of purely practical concerns who is happily following in his father's footsteps and taking care of the farm. As the play opens, Robert has just been offered as change to go to see with his merchant seaman uncle, an opportunity that would fulfill his wanderlust. However, a woman creates a conflict between the brothers and Andrew takes the trip while Robert stays on the farm. From here, the play opens to show how one's best-laid plans can be dashed by the unexpected, as both brothers lead lives of despair.

While BEYOND THE HORIZON won O'Neill the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes, it doesn't survive the test of time very well. He insists on spelling out everything for the audience, resulting in some of the most ridiculous and just plain unrealistic dialogue I have ever seen. Readers who grew up in the tradition left by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter will also find O'Neill's lengthly set design annoying, as in some parts he spends up to two pages laying out each and every detail instead of leaving it up to the director as is done nowadays. Finally, BEYOND THE HORIZON is rather provincial and has none of the refinement that readers today will have become used to. American theatre at this time lacked any figure to make it matter on the world stage, and while O'Neill was to become this figure with his later plays, this work shows him still very immature.

I believe BEYOND THE HORIZON is a work worth reading only if one has a particular interest in the evolution of American theatre or the works of Eugene O'Neill in general. Its poor writing makes it quite unentertaining.