Playwright: Eugene O'Neill. At: Eclipse Theatre Company at Athenaeum Theatre, 2136 N. Southport. Tickets: 773-935-6860 or www.eclipsetheatre.com; $28. Runs through: April 22
Love does not conquer all in Eugene O'Neill's 1920 drama Beyond the Horizon. And as the first play in Eclipse Theatre Company's three-show season dedicated to O'Neill (the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), the rarely produced Beyond the Horizon is an interesting historical work to explore.
Beyond the Horizon won O'Neill the first of the four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama he would receive for his works, which range in style from realism to experimental plays. Beyond the Horizon is an early O'Neill work, and therefore might be a tad too melodramatic for some modern tastes.
Beyond the Horizon focuses on a love triangle between two brothers and a neighboring Massachusetts farm woman in the early 20th century. Robert Mayo (John Wehrman) is more of a bookish dreamer, while his brother, Andrew (Nathaniel Swift), is a natural-born farmer. Everyone expects neighbor Ruth Atkins (Emily Shain) to marry Andrew, but when she shifts her affections to Robert right before he is set to take a long sea voyage, many hopes and dreams among the two families are soon derailed.
What's interesting is the case O'Neill makes that young love can be disastrous when acted upon impulsively, and how getting tied down can ruin one's life's ambitions. So it's a safe bet to guess that things won't turn out well for the folks onstage from the instant you spot the peeling wallpaper of Joe Schermoly's effectively foreshadowing set design.
Director Lou Contey is mostly effective at steering his actors to barrel through the text without lingering too long over some of the more overwrought dramatic passages about male pride. Yet there are times that you wish the ensemble wouldn't hold back and go all out for the heightened melodrama (particularly when the Mayo brothers fail to meet the level of their angrily bursting father played unsettlingly by Brian Parry).
Among the love-triangle-trio, Wehrman comes off best as the sickly and pride-filled Robert who realizes all too well of the mistakes he's made in life. I would have liked a bit more passion and aggravation from Shain's Ruth, while some more self-awareness from Swift as Andrew might have made Eclipse's Beyond the Horizon feel more tragic than it does now.
Among the supporting cast, the always-complaining Mrs. Atkins of Kate Harris is a guilty delight when set against the more understanding Mayo matriarch of Molly Lyons. Zach Bloomfield is also very genial as the intruding Irish seafaring uncle, Captain Scott.
Beyond the Horizon can't be lumped with O'Neill's greatest works, but it does provide a taste of what was to come. Eclipse's production is good on an informative historical level, if not so much for its nuanced dramatics.
