By Ruth Leon
17 Jun 2010
In his later plays, in the great ones, especially Long Day's Journey Into Night and Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill skirts the boundary of melodrama, but he never crosses it. O'Neill knew a lot about melodrama. His father was a famous barnstorming actor who toured the United States over and over again plying his trade and making his living as the Count of Monte Cristo. Melodrama also infused his family life: His mother was addicted to painkillers, his brother drank himself to death, and he himself suffered from both alcoholism and tuberculosis. Inevitably, in his first full-length produced play, Beyond the Horizon, the inexperienced playwright falls headlong into it, which didn't stop him from winning his first Pulitzer Prize.
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| Michael Malarkey and Michael Thomson in Beyond the Horizon |
| photo by Robert Day |
The inspiration for all his better plays is here. On a farm in Connecticut at the turn of the last century lives the Mayo family, James and Kate, with their two grown-up sons, Rob, the dreamer, the poet, dreaming (as O'Neill dreamed) of sailing away to foreign lands and having new experiences; his brother happy to stay on the farm. Until it all goes wrong.
Beyond the Horizon is a little too patterned, a lot too predictable, but fascinating nonetheless for what it shows of O'Neill's preoccupations and purposes before he found his true voice. It often sounds stilted and unreal but this is not over-acting by the cast so much as inexperience on the part of the playwright who couldn't, at this stage of his career, quite manage a speech that wasn't a mouthful. What shines through is his understanding of the American experience at just the time in his country's history when the coming of the railroads, the automobile, the industrial revolution — and the inherent restlessness of the American spirit — all came together to drive the previous satisfaction with life on the land into the background.
Far more successful, despite O'Neill's Pulitzer, both as a fully realized play and as a pointer to the future is Tennessee Williams' Spring Storm. Set in 1937 in a small town on the Mississippi, it is the harbinger of all the great Williams plays that will follow.
Here we have an empty-headed, half-educated Southern belle, rejoicing in the name of Heavenly Critchfield, who has made a bad choice. She has been sleeping with her childhood sweetheart, a local lout with no bloodlines or land who wants only to escape from the claustrophobia of the stifling Southern town and from Heavenly.
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| Liz White and James Jordan in Spring Storm |
| photo by Robert Day |
Right now, she's closest to Maggie the Cat (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) but you can almost feel how, not soon but in a few years, Heavenly will turn into Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire) and then into Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) and then, if she's lucky and she won't be, into Violet Venable (Suddenly Last Summer) as she goes on making bad decisions based on outdated values. But then, just look at her mother, Esmeralda (yes, really) a blood-and-land-obsessed Southern matron, a scared-silly woman whose daughter's marriage prospects are her only concern.
In this very funny play are all the seeds of what is to come. Here are all the nuances of class and religion and money for which Williams' had such perfect pitch. Here too are the many ways snobbery hurts, from the clever girl whose mother takes in sewing to the rich boy who knows every gradation of social chatter but doesn't know how to talk to the girl he loves. Here are all his later interests from the fear of madness to what will eventually become Stanley Kowalski's sexual charisma. It's all here and decidedly not to be missed.
And if you don't like the play you can always stand on the terrace with a glass of wine and watch the boats go by towards Tower Bridge.
For more information about the National Theatre, click here.
(Ruth Leon is a London and New York City arts writer and critic whose work has been seen in Playbill magazine and other publications.)
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