O’Neill had struck a blow for dramatic modernism and began to drag a reluctant American stage kicking and screaming with him.

The play opens in May at the Mayo farm. As readers will quickly see, O’Neill spends considerable time on the first stage direction, with very precise delineations of set and costume. One of his innovations in dramatic writing is the inclusion of highly developed, “literary” stage directions, even though often they would not, or could not, be followed in actual theatrical production. As many writers on O’Neill have noted, the author may have aimed his plays as much to readers as to viewers, a practice not particularly common in the American theater of this time. Indeed, one of the great problems in studying early American drama is the paucity of texts—we have names for many plays and entertainments but no scripts. For O’Neill, however, drama demanded its own place in print along with other literary forms. That first stage direction is almost a manifesto of sorts, announcing that American drama will be written on other principles than pleasing an account-book producer or Mrs. Grundy.

As Kurt Eisen reminds us, O’Neill very consciously sought in Beyond the Horizon to blend the novel with drama (Inner Strength 9-10, 33); the playwright himself, in a letter to The New York Times in 1920, speaks of recreating performance expectations in order for audiences to endure longer productions and thereby allowing the writer to bring out values then only possible in the discursive length of the novel. Robert Mayo’s problem and the conflicts he enters with his father, brother, and wife cannot be reduced to a few artifacts and stock situations; there is no villain, no forged will, no seducing tavern that leaves him trembling with delirium tremens, to cite only a few of the techniques for creating crises in the older theater. Rather, Robert wrestles with his own nature and its inevitable clash with others’ expectations. A vulnerable dreamer with no skill for farming or supplying a family’s material wants, Robert must look inside himself while the audience must take into account numerous complicating factors—the kind normally associated with long prose fiction—for the play to make sense. Having made his choice, however, Robert cannot escape its consequences; there will not be a sudden infusion of cash or a miracle cure for his illness or an inexplicable, sentimental outburst of saving love from Ruth. These things cannot happen in the dynamic established by O’Neill; there is no force of goodness to rescue a falling man in Act 3 when such a force cannot be seen in Act 1.

Andrew and Robert illustrate a dichotomy that appears in several O’Neill plays, that of the materialist and the dreamer. In Fog, for instance, the men in the lifeboat are a Poet and a Businessman, with appropriately different worldviews. Right from their first interchange, the brothers in Beyond are set in stark contrast: Robert, with his year in college, reads poetry; Andy, having just finished high school, works the land. They still care for each other, however, and accept their differences. Not surprisingly in O’Neill, a woman brings crisis, the disruption of the otherwise amicable male-male bond. Robert imagines that he can transform life with Ruth on the farm by his poetic gaze into the very beyond he has long dreamed of possessing.

Although it may seem artificial, the shift between interior and exterior scenes—one each in the three separate acts—produces its own rhythm. Each recreation of the interior space particularly signals a change downward in Mayo fortunes. Simply by adjusting people and props in the household space, O’Neill can jump narrative time and fill in the blanks without excessive dialogue devoted to history. The love talk from Act 1, scene 2, quickly shifts in stage time to something else, but the set allows us the transition. Ruth’s bitter attack on Robert, “If I hadn’t been such a fool to listen to your cheap, silly, poetry talk that you learned out of books,” and his bitter response, make sense when the mothers-in-law bicker in a room made dingy by time and inattention. The dreamer fails to inscribe his idealized horizon on the rest of the world.

In the last act, Robert’s tuberculosis, coupled with the brute difficulty of wresting a living from a hardscrabble New England farm, leads him toward death. His final appeal to the sun, a last gasp romance of rescuing his incipient dream, has the pathos of the striving failure of tragedy. Scholars have likened the ending to Oedipus at Colonnus or Ibsen’s Ghosts, where the syphilitic and dying Osvald Alving repeats, “The sun—the sun” (Ibsen 275-6), and something similar will appear at the end of Desire Under the Elms. But it also bears some resemblance to a contemporary play, Lula Vollmer’s prize-winning Sun-Up (1918). Vollmer, originally from North Carolina, was one of the first playwrights to capitalize on folk materials for modern drama; her fellow Carolinians, Paul Green in drama and Thomas Wolfe in fiction, are more likely to be remembered in this vein, but Vollmer’s play of a mountain family and the death of a farmer son who is caught up by the false romance of World War I also deals with some of the same dynamics as Beyond. It ends with sunrise, and the mother, angry over the death of her son in France, comes to an affirmative resolution in the raw poetic power of the sun over the land. Whether or not he was aware of Vollmer’s successful play or whether it had any influence on him, he went his own way with the device. In O’Neill, of course, the sunrise is both ironic and tragic—the reality of death in a ditch is too stark to give the audience anything special to cheer about.