Beyond the Horizon

The New York Times, February 8, 1920

Beyond the Horizon

By ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

There came to town last Tuesday afternoon, as a tentative and hesitant candidate for whatever hospitality this capricious and somewhat harassed city might be moved to offer, a play which, for all its looseness and a certain high-and-mighty impracticability, is possessed of elements of greatness. This was Beyond the Horizon, a vital and valid tragedy by Eugene G. O'Neill -- a play that is as native as Lightnin' and which has the mood, the austerity and, all in all, the stature of a novel by Thomas Hardy. Seldom has an American playwright written for our theatre a piece half so good and true.

It is O'Neill's first long play to reach the stage -- the first of three scheduled for production in this country before the strawberries come again. It has been preceded by six or seven one-act pieces, produced at different times by one or another of the experimental theatres in the byways of New York, those oft-derided, semi-amateur companies which are serving one of their chief purposes in life when they thus aid and encourage the short, trial flights of men like Eugene O'Neill.

Beyond the Horizon unfolds the tragedy of a young, farm-born dreamer, whose romantic mind and frail body yearn for the open sea, the swarming ports of the mysterious East, the beckoning world beyond the line of hills which shut in the acres of his home. By all that is in him, he is destined for a wanderer's life, but Fate, in a wanton mood, tethers him to this little hill-cupped farm and watches coolly the misery and decay this means for all his house. You meet him first at this cross-roads of his life and see him take the wrong turning. To him, on the night before he is to set sail for a three years' cruise around the world, comes love in the form of a neighbor's daughter whom he and all his people had thought marked rather for his brother. Blinded by the flame kindled in that moment of her confession, he lightly forgoes all thought of the world beyond the horizon, plans to settle at once on the farm with his jubilant bride, and watches serenely enough while his heart-wrenched brother sets forth on the cruise that was to have been his -- the bluff, unromantic brother who, irony of ironies, is a true son of the soil, born to do nothing but work its fields and sure to wither if uprooted.

Then you follow through the years the decay of that household, the tragedy of the misfit. You see the waning of love, the birth of disappointment, the corrosion of poverty and spite and disease. You watch the romance burn itself out to an ugly cinder. You see the woman grow drab and dull and sullen, and you see the man, wasted by the consumption that in another life might have been avoided, crawl at last out of the hated house to die on the road he should have traveled, straining his eyes toward the hills he never crossed.

All this is told with sure dramatic instinct, clear understanding, and a certain quite unsentimental compassion. To an extent unfamiliar in our theatre, this play seems alive. This is not merely because truth works within it nor because of the realness of its people. It is rather because of the visible growth and change that take place as the play unfolds.

The aging of the people is evidenced by more than the mere graying at the temples and the change of clothes, those easy symbols by which the theatre is wont to recognize, if at all, the flight of the years. In a hundred and one ways, it is evidenced as well by the slow changing of character and the steady deterioration of the souls -- a progression of the spirit which, by the way, asks great things of the actors, and, for the most part, asks not in vain. O'Neill paints his canvas with what Henley called "the exquisite chromatics of decay." You might almost say, then, that the play is alive because it follows the inexorable processes of death. Not since Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale has any book or play given us quite so persuasively a sense of the passage of time.

We have in O'Neill evidence a-plenty of a predisposition for the dramatic that is as pronounced as the Barrymore inheritance. But we have one who has lived so remote from the theatre that he has been uncorrupted by the merely theatrical and has carried over into his own workshop not one of the worn stencils and battered properties which are the dust-covered accumulations of years.

This same remoteness, which so freshens the air of his play, is probably responsible, also, for its considerable impracticability. He was an impractical playwright, for instance, who wrote into his play the character of a two-year-old girl and gave her two long scenes with business to do and lines to speak. He might have known that the part would have to be given to a child disturbingly, almost comically older than the baby called for by the context.

Certainly it was a quite impractical playwright who split each of this three acts into two scenes, one outside and one inside the Mayo farmhouse. It was natural enough for him to want to show the high-road of Robert Mayo's dreams, inevitable that he should itch to place one scene on the hilltop, with its almost protagonistic vista of the distant sea. But no essential purpose is served by these exteriors which could not have been served had they been unfolded within the farmhouse, without a break of any kind. Some of a novelist's luxuries must be forgone by a writer when he goes into the theatre, and one of the lessons he must learn is that the ever illusion-dispelling process of dropping a curtain, releasing an audience and shifting a scene is accepted twice and sometimes three times by a modern audience without even an unconscious resistance. But any further interruption works havoc with the spell. It may be reported here that, at the second performance, the third act was telescoped into a single scene, and it may be guessed that the play would not only be a better knit but a much more popular piece if the same violence were done the other acts as soon as possible.

In the theatre, what you want and what you get are very different. A more shop-wise playwright would have known that for his exteriors, each of them but a portion of an act and therefore certain to be of a hasty and makeshift nature, he could scarcely count on so illusive and charming a vista, so persuasive a creation of the outdoors as glorifies the final act of the Lee Simonson investiture for The Power of Darkness. The conspicuously dinky expanses of nature provided for Beyond the Horizon must have been a good deal of a shock to O'Neill. The wrinkled skies, the portière-like trees, the clouds so close you are in momentary expectation that a scrub-lady will waddle on and wash them -- these made doubly futile the dashes in and out of the Mayo farmhouse.

It is one thing for O'Neill to sit at his faraway seacoast study and dream a scene -- another thing to find it provided for his play when the first curtain rises in New York. It is instructive to compare the unillusive setting for his first scene with the stage picture as he had imagined it and set it forth in his script:

A section of a country highway. The road runs diagonally from the left forward to the right, rear, and can be seen winding toward the horizon like a pale ribbon between the low, rolling hills with their freshly plowed fields clearly divided from each other, checkerboard fashion, by the lines of stone walls and rough snake-fences.
The forward triangle cut off by the road, is a section of a field, from the dark earth of which myriad bright-green blades of Fall-sown rye are sprouting. A straggling line of piled rocks, too low to be called a wall, separates this field from the road.
To the rear of the road is a ditch with a sloping grassy bank on the far side. From the center of this an old, gnarled apple tree, just budding into leaf, strains its twisted branches heavenward with despairing gestures, black against the pallor of distance. A snake-fence sidles grotesquely from left to right along the top of the bank, passing beneath the apple tree.
The dreamy twilight of a day in May is just beginning. The horizon hills are still rimmed by a faint line of flame, and the sky above them is radiant with the dying flush of the sunset. This disappears gradually, and stars awake in the infinite, drowsily, one by one.
At the rise of the curtain, Robert Mayo is discovered sitting on the fence.

What O'Neill actually found on the Morosco stage was what people usually get who cry for the moon -- instead of sixpence.

There is scarcely room left to expatiate on the details of the deeply satisfying performance given by the composite company assembled for these special matinées. Except in one secondary role -- that of Mrs. Mayo -- the cast is admirable. Richard Bennett gives an eloquent and finely imagined performance as the dreamer -- a part John Barrymore would revel in. Indeed, Beyond the Horizon is such a play as belongs in his repertoire. Edward Arnold and the gifted Helen MacKellar are completely convincing. There must be special mention of the gorgeous performance given by Louise Closser Hale as the semiparalyzed mother-in-law who carps away at life from her wheel chair and regards Robert's yearnings with about as much sympathy as that intensely local old lady who bought David Copperfield's cowl, she whose motto in life was: "Let there be no meandering." It is worth going miles to see the way Miss Hale makes that wheel chair take a part in the play. She uses it as Mrs. Fiske uses a fan or a lorgnette, something to brandish, something wherewith to bridle and emphasize a thought or point a bit of wit.

The cast for Beyond the Horizon was assembled from the two companies which in the evening devote themselves to For the Defense and The Storm. The success of the amalgam which gave the producer almost as much freedom of choice as he needed, suggests that the double theatre is probably the best solution of the problem confronting the producer who is minded to create a repertory theatre. While New York awaits the somewhat doubtful benefit of a repertory theatre, it may be noted that much of the work expected of such an institution is being done by the modest institution known as the special matinée, which brought The Yellow Jacket to life again, and which, in Beyond the Horizon, has given us one of the real plays of our time.