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By Root 559 0

Morosco was not being performed. Beyond the Horizon told the story of two brothers on a farm: Robert, a poetic soul who dreams of the world “beyond the hills,” and Andy, a creature of prose, wedded to the land. But their destinies are reversed, and their lives wrecked, by love. Robert, who had planned on going to sea, instead stays on the farm in order to marry the girl he loves, while Andy, in love with the same girl, bitterly renounces both farm and family and takes Robert’s place aboard the ship. In the highly feminized and Christianized Victorian drama still then popular on Broadway, love had always been understood as the highest good, and home and hearth the final destination toward which the heart yearned. But for Robert, love is a terrible act of surrender, a betrayal of his deepest nature; and home quickly becomes a living hell as the farm collapses and his wife, Ruth, comes to despise him.

Beyond the Horizon is a resolutely un-Christian, uncomforting play in which only the tiniest scraps of human will escape the crushing force of fate. The most thoughtful critics immediately recognized the play as a work of genius. Alexander Woollcott wrote in The New York Times, “The play has greatness in it, and marks O’Neill as one of our foremost playwrights.” Heywood Broun, an equally influential figure, hailed it as a breakthrough in drama. But what is more remarkable still, Beyond the Horizon was a genuine success, running for 111 performances. An audience that had been satisfied with bonbons was now eager for meat. As Brooks Atkinson remarks in his history of Broadway, after Beyond the Horizon, “hokum dramas like The Easiest Way, Salvation Nell and The Witching Hour became impossible.” The demonically productive O’Neill would have nineteen plays produced on Broadway over the next fourteen years.

THE BROADWAY OF 1920 was a very different place from the Broadway of 1910, both physically and metaphorically. For one thing, “Broadway” was now effectively synonymous with “Times Square”; many of the theaters below 42nd Street had closed, while new ones were going up at a tremendous clip north of 42nd—twenty-eight in the second decade of the century, and seven more in 1921 alone. By the middle of the decade, well over two hundred new shows were opening on Broadway every year. Times Square now felt dense, complete, and self-contained. The empty spaces in the upper Forties had been filled, the rickety “tax-payers” (so called because they served to cover the developer’s real estate taxes) had been replaced by substantial buildings, and skyscrapers, such as the Candler Buildings on 42nd Street, and the Putnam Building, on the west side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th (where the Paramount Building now stands), had given Times Square a new sense of modernity and power. And Times Square was filled with dazzling light and color, which blocked out the drab working world beyond its borders even more effectually than the tall buildings did. Times Square had become that pagan temple before which Rupert Brooke reeled.

But neither geography alone, nor buildings, nor even lights, accounts for the sense of ineffable magic with which the very word “Broadway” was hedged; for it was only in these years that Broadway had begun to tell a tale of itself. Every Saturday, newspaper readers all over the country— which is to say, virtually all literate adults—turned to Franklin P. Adams’s syndicated column, “Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys,” to read about the doings of the Broadway crowd. Adams referred to himself as “FPA,” and to all his pals by their own special monikers: there were “I. Berlin” and “J. Kern,” and “G.S.K.” for George S. Kaufman, and “H.B.S.” for the publisher and gadabout Herbert Bayard Swope. Variety, the trade journal of the entertainment industry, was already ancient, having been founded in 1907, but by the mid-twenties Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Smart Set were all anatomizing the Broadway life in a snappy new Broadway patois for the benefit of readers marooned in Dullsboro. The great dailies’ theater columns, once a backwater