Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ah, Wilderness!

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.2.0286

2161-4318

Eileen Herrmann,

In his 1931 comedy Ah, Wilderness! (originally entitled Nostalgia), set during July 4–5, 1906, in small-town, middle-class America, Eugene O'Neill imagined a romantic young man's struggle to forge his identity against a shifting social and political backdrop. The main protagonist, sixteen-year-old Richard Miller, enjoys life within the bosom of the Miller family, bathed in the warmth of summery love. Richard Miller's penchant for romance is complicated by his flirtation with literature and socialism (indeed, O'Neill seems to be suggesting that the two are complementary). His coming-of-age rebellion includes both a sentimental devotion to one Muriel McComber, and a fondness for the writings of radicals like G. B. Shaw and Emma Goldman.Ah, Wilderness! comes at the end of O'Neill's “middle period,” after which he began to write plays that were increasingly autobiographical. At first glance, the play invites comparisons to the tragic Long Day's Journey Into Night written nine years later. Both sitting rooms are essentially the same; Richard Miller reads much the same literature as Edmund Tyrone; Mary Tyrone's complexity can be glimpsed in Richard's mother and aunt; and shades of Jamie Tyrone are detectable in the drunken Sid Miller.Yet while parallels exist between the two plays, Ah, Wilderness! is sunny and comic, colored by nostalgia for small-town life in pre–World War I America, complete with July Fourth folk ritual—for example, fireworks, picnics, gardens, and the beach. This is a world peopled with characters who underscore a sense of belonging within a community to which one wants to pledge allegiance. This world is far from that of Long Day's Journey Into Night—tragic, solipsistic, and bitter, inhabited by family members who merely coexist—a nighttime world of pain and suffering to which the outside world is not invited.Ah, Wilderness! marries the personal to the historical. As the play highlights the naturalness of Richard's romantic innocence, it also presents a historical perspective suggestive of a changing world. Richard's hot reading includes Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Swinburne, Nietzsche, and Goldman. His attraction to radical new trends of thought bewilders his family, shocking others and leading to his temporary estrangement from Muriel. The play succeeds in rendering characters who live the optimistic “Boom or Bust” moment—before World War I and the “Crash”—before they might feel economic privation, the inhumanity of man to man, the power of war to curb their patriotism, if not to disillusion it forever.I saw this American Conservatory production in San Francisco twice in one week. After the second time, Laurin Porter and I discussed the play with audience members. I had many questions concerning Ah, Wilderness! and was curious if this production would capture the play's delicate nuance, its tragic underpinning. Why, for example, did O'Neill write this play when he did? Could a Richard exist today? If O'Neill hadn't written it, would it still be considered a great play, a staple within the performance world? Must it be seen as a comic alternative to the tragic Long Day's Journey Into Night?O'Neill took his title from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough/A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou/Beside me singing in the Wilderness/Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” O'Neill replaced the “Oh,” with “Ah,” thus suggesting that this play is less about seizing the day before death than it is a loving look at a past when love reigned supreme. Here, love is redolent of a personal paradise to be treasured in the future as a favorite daguerreotype.O'Neill said the play came to him in a dream. Indeed, Ah, Wilderness! may be seen as a dream in which O'Neill rewrites the actual ending of his great love for Beatrice Ashe who rejected him in 1916 due to his drunkenness and lack of promise. In this production, Richard (played by Thomas Stagnitta) faces a seemingly insuperable obstacle to his love in Mildred's timidity. He rebels by rejecting the standard Fourth of July “lying talk about liberty.” Richard's imperative to “face life like it is” suggests the disjunction between small-town America and the wider world operated by the Pierpont Morgans, father and son—Gilded Age tycoons who dominated our banking institutions and invested in everything from Thomas Edison's electric company to railroads, steel companies, and insurance firms. Richard calls on the “workers of the world to unite, to rise, and cast off their chains!”As both revolutionary and romantic, Richard is alone within this family that exudes contentment. Their love for each other—family and country—is evident and meaningful. When Richard's sweetheart, Muriel (Rosa Palmeri), is forbidden to see Richard by her imposingly moralistic father (Adrian Roberts), Richard's rebellion intensifies: he accompanies Wint Selby (Matthew Capbarat) to a saloon where he consorts with a classic “tart,” Belle (Caitlan Taylor). While Stagnitta overaccented the situational humor, one still felt his humiliation when he was unceremoniously bum-rushed out of the bar into the street. Here, the division between upright parents and a coming-of-age child trying to find traction within a fallen adult world is apparent. Though Richard returns to the fold, remaining part of the loving Miller household, he has seen the underside of life; his lonely presence on the beach awaiting a rendezvous with Muriel in the play's final act strikes a somber chord.The company's acting was generally strong, yet there were misses. Stagnitta's emotions ran the gamut from endearingly joyous to pitifully depressing. The first time I saw the play I believed he was definitely overacting, and thus objectifying Richard. But the second time I saw the production, after he had turned down the heat, I missed the highs and lows of his former portrayal. Still, I understood something new about the character of Richard Miller: if Stagnitta couldn't decide on how to translate Richard onto the stage, Richard himself is not a type to be contained—his emotional life is complex—romantic and in flux. I wondered if directors could ever decide on how to portray Richard.Anthony Fusco, as Richard's tender, tolerant, and smart father Nat Miller, is not without his own sense of romance and idealism about the future (think Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life). Fusco's portrayal is so naturally fatherly, filled with tender love, intelligence, and understanding, that I was mesmerized. I relished the humanity he conveyed, especially evident in his awkward and shy talk about sex with the naive Richard. Dan Hiatt, as Nat's brother-in-law Sid, an alcoholic with an exuberant sense of humor, also stood out; blessed with a perfect sense of comic timing, he was hilarious. And yet he was as nuanced as a well-meaning, down-on-his luck relative could be. Sid's relationship with the complexly drawn and acted Lily (Margo Hall) provides the right dose of somber reality: Lily loves Sid dearly but repeatedly rebuffs his repeated proposals of marriage. I was less enamored of the distracted Rachel Ticotin's portrayal of Essie Miller until the fourth act when she displays her comedic chops through her laugh-provoking sudden reversals.Starring also in this production was the sophisticated set design of Ralph Funicello, a collection of floating windows and semi-transparent walls that suggested a home without quite becoming one. The lighting design of Robert Wierzel, an Obie Award–winning designer, created a dreamy atmosphere that switched between house, bar, and beach, thus evoking the play's nostalgia. One could get lost in the gauzy gorgeousness of the play. The costuming by Jessie Amaroso was spot-on.As in all proper romances, the hero is returned to an equilibrious state: Richard reunites with his love and, at the play's end, Nat reaffirms his romantic, albeit more mature, love for Essie. The apple (Richard) hasn't fallen far from the tree (Nat). Love remains in the air.In a letter to Lawrence Langner, O'Neill suggested that the play enabled him to turn an artistic corner, to break away from his old tragic formulas. Certainly, the Depression era may have prompted O'Neill to pull free from the tragic and try for a ringing affirmation of life. So too perhaps O'Neill's imagination was beginning to thaw, and Ah, Wilderness! enabled him to reassess the point in time when he had lost his way.In this play he presents a unique historical perspective on a benign period populated with likable characters. He privileges his memory and the result is a double perspective—between now and then, between a confusing, unknowable world and, ostensibly, a simpler time. The inevitable juxtaposition of our age and this 1906 world would be more jarring had the play not been written by Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill was not unaware of that disjunction (just a few years later he sketched a tragic sequel to the play in which war ensues; Essie dies; Nat is broken; Richard returns from the war maimed, and so on). With O'Neill's imaginative thaw, we wonder whether our nation was ever so innocent, and family lived up to its billing. We question if we can recapture our romantic past. Did it ever exist?I came away satisfied by Casey Stangl's nuanced ensemble and by the production's visually splendid design and lighting. I was left in a wistful and contemplative mood, happy that the play helped me recall the power of young romance. I felt nostalgic for a simpler, more innocent time; yet I recognized my feelings of loss may have been for a time existing only in the imagination.