[caption id="attachment_70224" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Wrenn Schmidt (Ruth Atkins) and Lucas Hall (Robert Mayo) in “Beyond the Horizon.” "]
"Beyond the Horizon" By Eugene O'Neill * Directed by Ciaran O’Reilly * Irish Repertory Theatre * Run extended through April 15
Twice in recent seasons, Ciaran O'Reilly, producing director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, has addressed himself to early plays by Eugene O'Neill with spectacular results. First, in 2006, there was "The Hairy Ape," originally produced in 1922, and then, three years later, in 2009, he directed an equally stunning production of "The Emperor Jones," which had first been staged in 1920.
Now, he has attempted a hat trick with a production of O'Neill's first full-length work, "Beyond the Horizon," which is very seldom revived. The awkward play is mainly of interest, however, because it brought the playwright the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.
The result, through no particular fault of O'Reilly's, is disappointing, because it simply doesn't offer him, or any director, the opportunities the other two early vehicles provided with such abundance.
O'Neill locates his play specifically on the Mayo farmstead in Eastern Massachusetts in a period of time stretching rather casually from 1907 through 1916, and dealing with a family with two sons and a convenient uncle who is the captain of a ship making regular and lengthy sea voyages.
One of the sons, Robert Mayo, fairly obviously patterned by O'Neill on himself, dislikes the farm and longs to go to sea and experience the world about which he reads so ferociously.
O'Neill, of course, did go to sea, however briefly, writing about the experience in a series of one act plays that have come to be known as "the Glencairn plays" in honor of the name he had given the ship at the center of the stories.
The playwright also suffered from tuberculosis, although, unlike Robert Mayo, who dies at the end of "Beyond the Horizon," he survived.
In the play, on the night before Robert plans to ship out as part of his Uncle Dick's crew, he confesses his love for Ruth Atkins, a pretty girl from a neighboring family. It turns out she returns his love, which motivates him to cancel his plans to go to sea. His brother, Andrew, who also loves Ruth, is devoted to the farm, but takes Robert's place on the uncle's ship.
Robert stays on the farm, marries Ruth and has a daughter with her. The marriage, however, based on a certain superficial mutual attraction, has quickly turned sour and turned into hostility, with Ruth resenting Robert's relentless reading and dreaming of distant places.
If O'Reilly can be faulted on anything, it's probably that, after the preview period ended, and the play opened officially, the pace was still decidedly laggardly, with this basically simple play taking nearly three full hours to unspool its plot. That may be partially a result of the fact that, of the cast's nine actors, only one had previously worked at the Irish Rep. That situation, of course, should improve with further playing.
The overall cast isn't among the Irish Rep's best, with only one actor, Lucas Hall, who plays Robert, really rising to meet the demands of the role.
The Rep production is, if anything, seriously under-produced, with Hugh Landwehr's simple set merely suggesting the farm in Massachusetts, with the play's action being played out on chairs and tables hauled on and off as required by the text's six leisurely scenes, three in each of the show's two acts.
Eugene O'Neill's memory deserves to be revisited, but, in the case of "Beyond the Horizon," it's perhaps somewhat difficult to see quite what the Pulitzer people saw in the play when it opened at the Morosco Theater on Feb. 3, 1920.
