Play review - "Beyond the Horizon" by Eugene O'Neill

O'Neill won his first Pulitzer with this effort. Not as deep as his later masterpieces, but still highly readable. I think this along with Anna Christie show O'Neill's craftmanship at full strength: there's a solid beginning, middle and end, a strong basic situation (love triangle between two brothers and a girl), plenty of melodrama and story. Not that it's predictable or stock - you keep wondering how it's going to turn out. You know it's a bad decision for the bookish brother to decide to stay - but you don't know just how bad it's going to be. I related to that character - someone who was never going to make a go of farming, not a bad person just not cut out for a tough life (does O'Neill ever say anything nice about farming?). You wonder if the farm brother is going to make a go of it at sea - well, he does and he doesn't, which is O'Neill all over. Not as expressionistic as his later works, but still powerful - especially effective are the characters of Ruth, the wife who changes her mind about who she loves, her bitch of a mother, never happy about anything, and the boys' mother, never doing the right thing by her sons.