Modern Play for 2012-13 Season

Each year we read at least one modern play.  Here's the introduction to this year's play:

Our play tonight is Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon.  This play was produced in 1920 and was O’Neill’s first full-length play.  He won a Pulitzer Prize for this play and it represented the beginning of a new era in American theater.

Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in a NY hotel to an acting family.  He died in a Boston hotel in 1953.  He did not have a happy family life, either as a son or as a father himself but he had theatre in his blood.

Eugene O’Neill’s plays are characterized by dreams deferred, discord and family strife.  You are perhaps familiar with his later plays, The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey into Night.  The play we will hear tonight has all the features of an O’Neill play in prototype.

The play is set on a coastal New England farm at the beginning of the 20th century.  Andrew and Robert Mayo are brothers very different in temperament but devoted to one another.  Andrew is a born farmer, planted in the soil, and Robert is a romantic poet who wants to roam the world.  Unfortunately, they both love the girl next door, Ruth.   On one fateful night decisions are taken which have lifelong ramifications.

I saw this play on PBS in 1976 and I found it very moving.  Perhaps it was the fact that I too was making decisions at that time that would set the course of my life.  Perhaps O’Neill just resonates with me.  This is not true with everyone and O’Neill’s popularity as a playwright has ebbed and flowed.

Although popular in the 20’s and 30’s, post-war critics were not favorably disposed to him.  But O’Neill kept writing even though some of his works were only first performed posthumously.  Our play is rarely produced though in 2010 saw a revival at the National Theatre of London.  The PBS version which was produced by McCarter Theatre of Princeton, was the only major production in a 60 year period.

We present Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon.