When in Rome*, let’s get back to theatre a little bit. What is tragedy? I find the mind wanders around this question when reading something like Eugene O'Neill’s Beyond The Horizon.** Is it simply the demonstration of the futility of optimism or is it the mere marching forward of the inevitable? If one wants to make a tragedy, does one simply have to point at a baby and hiss ‘One way or another that thing is going to die and no matter how you dress it up, it ain’t going to be pretty or painless’ After all it has long been known that one of the great adhesives of human connectivity is the fact that all lives, rich or poor, experience suffering. Everybody loses somebody in the end. It stings just a little bit more when it’s your parent, spouse, sibling, or child. The hook of Beyond the Horizon, is that it rings the Mayo family through each one of those terrible,painful losses, and most of them happen between acts, off stage. What O’Neill does so very effectively is show how that sense of loss, be it loss of pride, will, loved ones, or finances, colors every relationship that surrounds them.
The main focus is a man, Robert Mayo, who probably just made the wrong turn at a fork in his life’s road pays for it again and again in spades. He decided to be a farmer when he wasn’t cut out for it, for the sake a of youthful declaration of love. His father, the real farmer dies, his brother takes up the life of seafaring adventure he always dreamed of, his young love sours, the child from that love dies, his mother dies, and finally he reaches death’s door without much to show for the struggle of his life.
Robert looked at the hills of his family farm, and dreamed that adventure and purpose lay just beyond their crest.*** These hills brought him great joy in his youth, and the first Act. The joy of hope for a better future. Once life had made him into lemonade however, he learned to curse the hills and their allure, or lack thereof. Ruth, Robert’s doomed betrothed, looked at Robert like he looked to the future. He was her future, and she watched him fail day in and day out for years. She grew to hate him, just as he hated those hills. That’s the terrible thing about young love though, it either sours like milk or ages like wine.
I wonder if anyone looked at the founding of Rome and its seven measly hills in the same way. As soon as you understand the Apennine Mountains are on the horizon, those hills would look awful tiny, and what are any of them compared to Olympus?
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*I’m in Rome
**As I did, on the flight to Rome.
***I.e.their horizon
