My goodness, these two revivals speak well for our embattled regional rep, or at least for Laurie Sansom’s Royal Theatre in Northampton, where they appeared last year under the title of Young America. Young because Beyond the Horizon was the 32-year-old Eugene O’Neill’s first full-length play and because Tennessee Williams wrote Spring Storm as a 26-year-old student at the University of Iowa. And both are finely acted by Sansom’s company—among whom I see potential star actors, notably the brilliantly versatile Liz White.

In Horizon she’s Ruth, who falls for and marries Michael Malarkey’s Robert while rejecting his equally adoring brother, Michael Thomson’s Andy. It’s a terrible error. Both men are the son of a farmer, but Robert, a dreamer who had longed for a life at sea, is left to tend the crops while Andy, who has the greenest fingers in Connecticut, escapes to an unrewarding series of voyages. The result makes it painfully clear that O’Neill was the first American dramatist with a genuinely tragic vision.

From a lesser dramatist you’d expect a tale of sibling rivalry, yet both brothers behave impeccably. Disaster ensues because each has allowed love, or imagined love, to distort his essential self. The farm declines. Robert, who has much in common with O’Neill himself, develops the dramatist’s disease, TB. Andy, though abler, displays some of the self-destructiveness that was to ruin O’Neill’s brother Jamie. But it’s the withering of White’s Ruth as she reacts to disappointment with anger, selfishness, despair and, finally, nihilism that makes the play and production so special.

Spring Storm is also about the vagaries of love, sexual self-discovery and those emotional confusions that were always to afflict and preoccupy Williams. Whom does Malarkey’s effete but eligible Arthur (pictured, with White) want? Probably not Anna Tolputt’s equally bookish Hertha, and maybe not even White’s pretty, posh Heavenly, who is anyway besotted with Thomson’s brawny, restless and well-named Dick. The second act, like Arthur’s mind, is all over the place, but there are fascinating intimations of Williams’s future work (that socially ambitious Southern matriarch!) and some superbly observed moments.

I won’t soon forget Arthur sitting po-faced while Heavenly manages to be sexy, flirtatious, flustered, needy, canny, knowing and idiotic. And I don’t think I’ll forget White’s acting, period.