Review - Beyond The Horizon: We've All Got Our Junk

Though Eugene O'Neill was a grownup thirty-one years of age when Beyond The Horizon, his first full length play, opened on Broadway in 1920, the landmark domestic drama is boiling over with so much youthful angst you might expect its trio of lovers to start whipping out microphones to belt out emo rock numbers.

In Facebook terms, "It's Complicated" best describes the romantic status in America's first great playwright's first Pulitzer winner. The Mayo brothers, Robert and Andrew, are the best of pals despite both being in love with the pretty neighbor girl, Ruth. The hard-working Andrew keeps the Massachusetts family's farm profitable while Robert frequently goes off by himself to read poetry and dream of a life of adventures beyond the Horizon.

Their seafaring uncle has offered Robert his first chance at seeing the world with a job on his next outgoing ship, but the day before he's to leave he learns that Ruth returns his feelings for her. So Robert ditches his previous dreams to get married and settle down as a farmer. Crushed, but not wanting to spoil his brother's happiness, Andrew decides to take Robert's place on the boat. But as time goes by, Robert's ineptitude at farming, Andrew's inability to shake his feelings for Ruth and Ruth's realization that Robert will not be the kind of responsible provider that his brother would be all contribute to the troubles and tragedies to come.

By contemporary standards, Beyond The Horizon seems quite heavy-handed without a hint of subtext, but in its day the play was considered a refreshingly realistic tragedy compared with the melodramas of the period. Director Ciaran O'Reilly's Irish Rep production takes a direct, sincere approach to the emotions behind the contrivances of the plot and actually turns out to be quite charming.

Lucas Hall might have the toughest job of the night, giving realistic readings to the overly poetic speeches O'Neill assigns to Robert, but he's a likeable innocent, especially in scenes with his young daughter, Mary (a delightful Aimee Laurence). Rod Brogan does a terrific job as Andrew, showing the character's growth from a content, uncomplicated worker to a shrewd businessman, all the while trying to hide his love for Ruth out of loyalty to his brother.

Wrenn Schmidt does an outstanding job taking Ruth from a sweet and shy girl to a woman hardened from frustration over her husband's ineptitude to a battered soul just about giving up on any chance for happiness.

John Thomas Waite makes a humorous impression as the crusty old salt of an uncle and doubles as the plain-speaking doctor who delivers bad news.

Set designer Hugh Landwehr and lighting designer Brian Nason provide some lovely visuals utilizing an abstract backdrop of seaside Horizons.

While O'Neill certainly had greater achievements to come, the Irish Rep's production embraces this rarely performed youthful work, and the result is surprisingly satisfying.

Photos by Carol Rosegg: Top: Wrenn Schmidt and Lucas Hall; Bottom: Lucas Hall and Rod Brogan.

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"(The Drowsy Chaperone is) so entertaining you can overlook the fact it came from Los Angeles."

-- Howard Kissel

The grosses are out for the week ending 2/26/2012 and we've got them all right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.

Up for the week was: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (20.5%), STICK FLY (13.4%), HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING (11.3%), THE ROAD TO MECCA (9.3%), ANYTHING GOES (7.4%), DEATH OF A SALESMAN (7.0%), PORGY AND BESS (4.6%), War Horse (4.2%), JERSEY BOYS (3.8%), MAMMA MIA! (3.2%), MARY POPPINS (2.5%), ROCK OF AGES (1.3%), MEMPHIS (1.0%), WICKED (0.2%), SEMINAR (0.1%),

Down for the week was: SHATNER'S WORLD: WE JUST LIVE IN IT (-12.9%), CHICAGO (-6.8%), VENUS IN FUR (-6.4%), SISTER ACT (-5.4%), GODSPELL (-2.6%), PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT (-1.9%), OTHER DESERT CITIES (-1.7%), WIT (-1.3%), SPIDER-MAN TURN OFF THE DARK (-0.3%),

It's not your garden variety playwright who can draw you into a two-person drama with an extended dialogue comparing the healing effectiveness and fragrance of competing brands of foot salts. But the comfortable comic exchanges that sweeten the early moments of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot cleverly turn horrific by the final blackout, thanks to an excellent pair of performances created under the playwright's own direction.

Premiering in 1961 with one performance in Johannesburg and eventually reaching Off-Broadway in 1964, Blood Knot was the first piece to bring international attention to the South African whose plays helped educate the world of everyday life during apartheid.

The story is set in the ramshackle home shared by half-brothers Morris (Scott Shepherd) and Zach (Colman Domingo). Though they were raised by their black biological mother, their different fathers are the reason the dark-skinned Zach and the light-skinned Morris would be unrecognizable as brothers.

With Morris able to pass for white, they make a meager living and spend much of their time playing adolescent fantasy games, one of which has the educated Morris helping Zach start a correspondence with a woman advertising for a pen pal. But when the woman sends a photo, revealing herself to be white, and writes that she'll be visiting their area and wants to meet, it leads to the surfacing of attitudes and resentments previously bottled inside, signaled throughout the play by the periodic rings of a symbolic alarm clock.

After a jarring moment involving Christopher H. Barreca's set, a dilapidated hut seeming safely isolated from reality, they play out the most disturbing of their inner fantasies. Shepherd and Domingo do exceptional work balancing the text's abstract moments with a realistically uneasy bond between the brothers. While the play has its slow-moving sections and seems a bit stretched by the end, the evening's high points are potent, particularly if you place yourself as a viewer back in the 1960s.

Photo of Scott Shepherd and Colman Domingo by Joan Marcus.

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