#2005-06: With O’Neill
“Suppose I was to tell you that it's just beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell which lures me, the need of freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on----in quest of the secret which is hidden over there----beyond the horizon?”
Frank and unbending as a tragedy, this play unfolds the tale of Robert Mayo who is the victim of his dreams.
As he is about to start on a long sea voyage with his uncle, he believes he is badly in love with Ruth, the girl who is engaged to his brother Andrew. She impetuously throws Andrews over and accepts Robert, while Andrew sails in his place.
Before long Robert learns that the marriage was a blunder; he is sure that she is still captivated by Andrew.
Three years pass and Robert, ailing and disenchanted, with only his child to soothe him, fails despondently in his efforts to make a go at the farm.
Andrew comes back momentarily, only to bring despondency to both Ruth and Robert.
The woman realizes that no longer loves her and Robert, who had hoped to get from his brother at least a gasp of romance he had longed for, finds Andrew an ordinary and uninspired materialist.
From this point, Robert is the central figure.
We are shown the psychological and corporeal squalor of a man who cannot live without illusions: “you see the weakening of love, the birth of displeasure, the deterioration of poverty and malice and ailment. You watch the romance burn itself out to an ugly cinder.
You see the woman go dreary and monotonous and glowering, 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 travelled, straining his eyes towards the hills he never crossed.”
Each character in the play is infatuated by his hankering for what he can never have — for what lies ‘beyond the horizon’.
O’Neill’s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, established once and for all his reputation as a great American dramatist. A realistic play, it deals grimly not only with the life of a farmer but ends on a note of complete and unrelieved frustration.
The play won O’Neill his first Pulitzer Prize, the highest American Prize for Literature. He was so poorly off at that time that he told his friends subsequently: “When my wife wired me the news, I thought it meant some wooden medal or other, until a friend told me that it was a thousand dollars. Then I came to, and paid off some of my worst debts.”