By HEYWOOD BROUN

Eugene O’Neill’s “Beyond the Horizon,” which as produced at a special matinee at the Morosco Theatre yesterday, is a significant and interesting play by a young author who does not as yet know all the tricks.  Fortunately, he therefore avoids many of the conventional shoddy strategems, but at the same time there is an occasional clumsiness which mars his fine intent and achievement.  Nevertheless, the play deserves a place among the noteworthy achievements of native authors.  It is frankly and uncompromisingly a tragedy.  A happy ending would be unthinkable, but O’Neill has gone a little way toward an opposite extreme and insisted on polishing off his play with certain tragic happenings which are not quite relevant to his theme.

The story concerns two farm boys, Robert and Andrew, closely knit though widely varying in type.  Robert longs to be free of the grind of the farm and to find adventure and release in the far-off places.  Incidentally, his health has not been good, so his family agrees when he accepts the invitation of a seafaring uncle to take a long voyage around the world on a sailing craft.  The very day before his departure he finds that he is beloved by the daughter of the neighboring farmer.  He had thought about her romantically, but reservedly, since he believed that she cared for his brother.  Her sudden confession that he is the one she loves sweeps him off his feet momentarily, and he decides to stay on the farm.  The brother, chagrined to find himself not favored, takes his place on the voyage.

The girl and the boy marry and he makes a fearful mess of farming.  And he finds that he has made a mess of life as well, for the girl discovers that, after all, it was the competent Andrew whom she loved all the time.  In a bitter scene she upbraids him with his weakness and tells him that when Andrew returns he can take to the road if he chooses and let Andrew run the farm.  On his return, however, Andrew soon shows that he is entirely cured of his youthful love, and in a single day he is off again to seize a business opportunity in the Argentine.  The luckless couple muddle along on the farm and things go from bad to worse, until in the last act Robert dies of consumption and finds his chance at last to escape from the little valley and go to the far places. 

Of course, the fundamental tragedy of the play lies in the fate of the incompetent dreamer forced to battle with the land for a living against every inclination and ability.  His disease and death are entirely fortuitous and indeed they lessen the poignancy of his fate, which would have had more force of fear and pity if the author had left him still engaged in his hopeless sand thankless task of keeping on and on in the dreary grind.  The hero is much too deliberate in dying and the last act is further marred by the addition of a scene which is unnecessary and which compels a wait at a time when the tension is seriously impaired by the fall of the curtain.

O’Neill begins crudely but honestly and frankly with a scene in which two of his characters sit down and tell the audience the things they need to know, but after this preliminary scene the play gathers pace and power, and until the final act it is a magnificent piece of work, a play in which the happenings are of compelling interest, and more than that, a play in which the pot of view of everyone concerned is concisely and clearly set forth in terms of drama.  Everybody who saw the best of O’Neill’s short plays when they were given by the Washington Square, the Greenwich Village, or the Provincetown Players realized that he had an extraordinary ability to write true and absorbing dialogue.  He has done it better than ever in “Beyond the Horizon.”  His characters talk like real people and yet the process of selection has been so shrewd that there is none of the deadening dullness of the merely literal and photographic.

The power of the play is tremendous, and there is no sense of the author’s arbitrarily moving pawns about into implausible situations to thrill an audience.  It is as honest and sincere as it is artistic.  In the last act we found a distinct letdown in spite of some splendid writing for the theater, because O’Neill has by that time become so carried away with his theme that he has not been able to hold it at arm’s length and slash and cut in the light of the fact that audiences are human and fallible and demand a brevity in the relation of all happenings which keep them in the theater after 5 in the afternoon or 11 at night.  And more than that, as we have said, it does not seem to us that the progress of the hero’s disease is an inevitable part of his tragic career.

The play is to be presented again at a matinee on February 4 and again on February 6.  It is to be hoped that a theater will soon be found at which the play may be put on for a regular run, since it is by far the best serious play which any American author ahs written for years.  It is pleasant to record this, for, in a measure, “Beyond the Horizon” offers a justification for all reviewers who went down in the various little alley theaters and shouted loudly about some of the work which was done there.  O’Neill’s short plays have received such recognition for several years and yet we feel certain that when his long play achieves the success which it deserve, and which it is pretty sure to get, the author will be hailed as a brand new playwright who has just been discovered.  His first production on Broadway will be set down as his dramatic birth in spite of such splendid forerunners as “Bound East for Cardiff” and “Where the Cross Is Made.”

It is to be hoped that when the play goes on for a regular run most of the present company may be retained, for the performance is one of exceptional skill.  Richard Bennett as the hero seems to us to play better than ever before, and there also are performances of an unusually high order by Louis Closser Hale, Helen MacKellar and Erville Anderson, not forgetting good work by Edwin Arnold, Max Mitzel and a child actress called Elfin Finn.  In speaking of the fact that O’Neill is still somewhat impractical in the theater, it is worth noting that he provides this child shall be two years old.  Of course the little actress is perhaps ten or twelve, but then it seems to us that we remember other actresses in the theater who have played roles even further removed from their actual ages.