The son only wants revenge: the farm is nothing more than a square of dirt, and the money is merely the agency for his getting back at the father, not an end in itself. If in Where the Cross the son becomes intoxicated by obtaining an ill-gotten patrimony, in Rope Luke disdains patrimony; a ritual killing of the father, in the form of torturing the whereabouts of the money from him (another motif from McTeague), allows him to obliterate inheritance and reenter life as a free, fatherless, utterly independent man.

The ending is full of irony, of course, but it is also a plot trick more in keeping with stage entertainments than serious drama. That Mary is implicated, however, reveals something else going on with the play. As with Ile, Rope was directed by Nina Moise; although it is not as centered on a woman as Ile is with Annie Keeney, Rope hints more about women than it tells. Annie Sweeney—an interesting name echo—accuses her father of destroying their mother, then carrying on with a woman who slept around; that woman, Luke’s mother—much younger than Abraham—is also gone. As in other early O’Neill plays, the rigid patriarch leaves no space for the feminine in his life, unless it suits his comfort. Though Annie has some importance to the story, the absent women, who speak only through signs or remembrances, take up more of the thematic space. One task in reading O’Neill is to find women’s voices when they are only scantily provided; perhaps other writers, as Sena Naslund has done with Melville’s Moby-Dick in her novel Ahab’s Wife (1999), will give new voice to the loud silences of absent women that punctuate O’Neill’s plays. As it is, many of O’Neill’s one-act plays almost contain shadow stories of unseen characters—ghost plays, perhaps, psychologically present if not physically represented on stage. In that sense, he follows in the tradition of the naturalists Crane and Norris, for whom women are at best victims or nags and hardly credible characters in their own right.

FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

Beyond the Horizon (1918)

Beginning serious writing of Beyond the Horizon in New York the fall of 1917, O’Neill did not finish his first important full-length play until the early months of 1918, after going to Provincetown. During that period, the story evolved from that of a literally roaming character to one who dreams about it but stays home. Stephen Black suggests that the suicide of his friend Louis Holladay played a role in O’Neill’s retreating from depicting someone who abandons all old relationships (213). Whatever the cause, the playwright had a moment of inspiration, apparently, and shifted gears to write essentially the current text. He gave the manuscript to John D. Williams to produce; when Williams failed to do anything, the actor Richard Bennett read it and finally prodded Williams into putting it into production, though the latter initially planned only a short run. Opening at the Morosco Theater on February 3, 1920, the play moved to the Criterion and Little Theaters, with a total of over one hundred performances. Despite multiple problems with the actual production, as Ronald Wainscott enumerates, including poorly prepared scenery and acting styles that did not meet the demands of O’Neill’s play, it nevertheless inspired audiences enough to see it and critics to have it chosen for a Pulitzer Prize, O’Neill’s first (Wainscott, Staging 9-29).

O’Neill claims to have developed the idea for the play in the summer of 1917, with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as a model, but the germ may have come before that. In 1916, after the Provincetown Players had gone to New York for their winter season, O’Neill’s short play Before Breakfast appeared on the same November 17 bill as that of his associate at the time, Neith Boyce. Her one-act play Two Sons features brothers at a seashore house, Paul and Karl, who are in an unstated rivalry over Paul’s ostensible girlfriend Stella. The mother, Hilda, worries out loud to the artist, Paul, that Karl, a man comfortable with the physical world and just returned home after an absence, will steal Stella from him. Paul doesn’t see it, but Hilda forces a confrontation between the brothers that leads to Karl’s denunciation of women and his expression of love for his brother. It is quite likely that O’Neill, a conflicted brother and son himself, may have stored the basic story and simply switched the roles for Beyond the Horizon, with the sensitive brother, Robert, taking the girl from the practical worldly one, Andrew. Because Before Breakfast and Two Sons were also printed together in Provincetown Plays, Third Series (1916), O’Neill would have owned a copy of Boyce’s drama. Beyond the Horizon is certainly the more ambitious of the two plays, but it must be remembered that O’Neill was also aware of and perhaps borrowing from his lesser-known contemporaries.

Despite its great importance in theater history as a play that began to change mass audience taste away from melodrama and toward serious drama, Beyond the Horizon has had relatively few theatrical revivals since the 1920s. Even while the play was in production, Richard Bennett complained of the length of the dialogue and argued O’Neill into making significant cuts for the stage. The playwright’s own father, no doubt proud to see his son’s work on Broadway, is supposed to have asked Eugene if his point was to drive everyone in the audience to suicide (Sheaffer, Playwright 477). Others have questioned the purpose of Robert Mayo’s transformation from potential poet wanderer to stay-at-home farmer. Yet there is no doubt that despite the production problems, the play had a powerful effect on its first viewers. In Black’s words, the dramatist had “created the first play written in North America that deserves to be thought of as a tragedy in the tradition of the Greeks” (215). The very idea of a true American tragedy struck critics as something new—exciting to some; threatening, even incomprehensible to others.