Eugene O’Neill’s “Beyond the Horizon” lights up the Irish Rep’s stage

O'Neill a first class Irish writer

Schmidt never misses a note on the long road from love to loathing, but the sheer force of O’Neill’s imaginings seem to hit the young actress with the same intensity they hit his creations. By curtain she looked shell-shocked and spent, a sure sign that the emotional wallop this play delivers is more than just skin deep.

Beyond the Horizon is about losing the courage to live the life you’ve dreamed of – and the steep cost that making safer choices can result in.

Set on an open road, one that cruelly has not been taken, the play is at its best when it focuses on the individual costs that bad decisions (an O’Neill obsession) create in all the years that follow them.

Ciaran O’Reilly directs lucidly throughout and is to be thanked for reviving this absorbing early play.

The production has uneven moments when light comedy involving the old sea dog Captain Dick Scott seems to belabor the play’s dual themes of choice and consequences, but the pace revives after the early act one banter and the work turns into something increasingly rich and strange.

O’Reilly has become an ideal interpreter of O’Neill’s work because he brings both an Irish and American sensibility to his staging, and in the process he has revealed something arresting about the writer -- O’Neill is an Irish playwright, at least spiritually because he stands at all times with his maimed Irish forbears.

Beyond the Horizon plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre. 132 West 22nd Street, until April 8. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishrep.org.

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