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Second Thoughts #6: Ah, Wilderness!
by Elyse Sommer
I agree with both Allan Wallach's appraisal of the Lincoln Center revival of Ah, Wilderness! and Les Gutman's of last summer's revival of the play by NATCO (the company which showcases the talents of Asian Americans in performances of western theater classics. Since my review of O'Neill's later and much darker play in his family trilogy, Long Day's Journey Into Night coincided with Allan Wallach's review and since I will be seeing Moon For the Misbegotten (of the same trilogy) in the Berkshires this summer, I thought a Second Thoughts piece on Wilderness was in order. Like my Second Thoughts #5 on Cabaret this not a second review but once again a miscellany of addendums.
AW precedes excerpts from Allan Wallach's review. Text preceded by ES will give my take on that excerpt . For the full review, ( click here. . .for Les Gutman's review of a summer '97 production click here . . .and for my review of Long Day's Journey Into Night click here.)
AW --. . . the Millers are the family O'Neill wished he'd had -- an all-American clan that celebrates the Fourth of July, bickers affectionately, forgives willingly and tolerates the foolishness of the adolescent.
ES-- Having first seen the autobiographical masterpiece that grew out of this earlier play lent a special sweet taste to watching the American-as-apple-pie sweetness of this turn-of-the-century family. It also made me more aware of the not so rosy elements that crept in, (probably unintentionally). The Tyrones' relationships are riddled with guilt and blame-placing. Like the Millers they love each other but their self-destructive instincts win the day. The Millers while made of stronger stuff are not immune to using guilt to manipulate. This is most evident in the two unhappy characters, Aunt Lily and Uncle Sid. Lily refuses to marry Sid because she knows he won't ever stop drinking, but never cuts him off completely -- instead she repeatedly forgives him for falling off the wagon which makes him her repentant and adoring slave.
Richard's drunken escapade has his parents follow Lily's pattern of loving forgiveness. He in turn shows he's picked up on this when he begs for his girlfriend's sympathy by trying to make her feel partially responsible for his spree.
With the memory of Frances Sternhagen's ghostly and grim final scene fresh in my mind, I was glad to see that O'Neill avoided spoiling the genuine warmth and affection in this his only joyous play by reining in his tendency to emphasize what today's mental health professionals call "unnourishing behavior patterns."
AW -- Daniel Sullivan's insightful direction . . . make this one of the New York theater season's triumphs.
ES-- Seeing both plays just a few weeks apart also made me particularly conscious and appreciative of Mr. Sullivan's subtle touches for dramatizing the overriding love that makes the Millers such prototypes of normalcy. He does this most tellingly by setting the final scene in Essie and Nat's bedroom, (more commonly a continuation of the living room/porch setting). The Millers may be prudish and unable to talk easily about intimacy, but they are clearly having a satisfactory sexual life. And so Richard rebels against his parents patriotic idealism, but he also aborbs the feelings that sustain their relationship. It is their example that guides what he does with his adolescent hormonal urges as much as the books he reads.
Speaking of those books, the overlapping poetic references made by the younger son underscores the connection between Wilderness and Journey. The Rubáiyát of Khayyá¢m while only seeding a passing quote in Long Day provided Ah, Wilderness! with its title and crops up throughout that play -- most touchingly as a final observation, not by the son but the father:
Yet, Ah, that spring should vanish
with the rose!
That youth's sweet scented manuscript
should close!
Hearing the middle aged father read that book is what gives this play its real and convincingly happy ending. Nat may have grown somewhat complacent but he can still be reached by that touch of the poet, and convey that feeling to his wife.
AW -- O'Neill set the play in ``a large small-town in Connecticut'' in 1906, that no doubt resembled his own New London. The memories, as Lynn M. Thomson points out in an insightful essay in the spring Lincoln Center Theater Review, come out of the tradition of rural American comedies that must have been familiar to the playwright, who grew up with a matinee-idol father. .
ES-- It's worth noting that savvy theater goers should save these journals (available in the lobby) as terrific pieces of theater ephemera. They're handsomely designed, printed on good stock and filled with well-written and informative essays. The Thomson essay mentioned by Allan, is accompanied by a fascinating genealogical illustration bearing the title "Families Over the Millenia -- An Eclectic Literary History." Serving as the root of the chart is a photograph of a tree at the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Center. From the chronological main branch -- (The Orestia, Medea, Oedipus, Hamlet, King Lear, A Doll's House, The Three Sisters and The House of Bernard Alba ) -- the chart branches out to the right and left. The right branch leads from Long Day's Journey Into Night to The Glass Menagerie, The Death of a Salesman and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? The left branch shows Ah, Wilderness! as the parent to four pop culture spinoffs. Topping this list is the Andy Hardy series (in which Mickey Rooney who played Richard both in the original Broadway version, the movie adaptation and a flop movie musical called Summer Holiday ). Other sitcom Wilderness children are I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch
AW --You can see why O'Neill may have wished his own family had been more like the Millers instead of the Tyrones. .
ES-- From my vantage point of seeing the later play first, it also becomes evident what a difference a half a dozen years can make. Long Day's Journey is set just two years before the outbreak of a great World War so that not just O'Neill's family is shadowed by tragedy, but the whole sunny world of 1906 and Ah, Wilderness! When you consider this excerpt from a January 14, 1933 letter about Ah, Wilderness! by O'Neill to his son, it's not so much about one non-existent family as a no-longer existing life style: It has very little plot. It is more the capture of a mood, an evocation [of] the spirit of a time that is dead now with all its ideals and manners and codes--the period in which my middle teens were spent-a memory of the time of my youth-not of my youth but of the youth in which my generation spent youth. There is very little actually autobiographical about it except a few minor incidentals which don't touch the story at all . It is not a play one can explain. Perhaps if I give you the subtitle you will sense the spirit of what I've tried to recapture in it: A Nostalgic Comedy of the Ancient Days when Youth was Young, and the Right was Right, and Life was a Wicked Opportunity. Yes, it is a comedy-and not in a satiric vein like Marco Millions and not deliberately spoofing at the period (like most modem comedies of other days) to which we now in our hopeless befuddlement and disintegration and stupidity feel so idiotically superior, but laughing at it's absurdities while at the same time appreciating and emphasizing its lost spiritual and ethical values. AW --Sullivan begins the play with the actors grouped as though for a family portrait, which in a way is what Ah, Wilderness! is . . .
ES-- This tableau opening was also used to good effect in the new musical Ragtime ( see our review) which actually included a photographer. The musical based on E.L. Doctorow's novel is also fed by a spirit of optimism, but with its broader canvas and denser plot, it encompassed the changes wrought by those times whereas O'Neill restricts his portrait to one that is frozen into a two-day time frame.
LINKS TO OTHER EUGENE O'NEILL PLAYS REVIEWED
Ah, Wilderness! (NATCO)
Long Day's Journey Into Night (NATCO)
Long Day's Journey Into Night (Irish Rep)
Desire Under the Elms
Beyond the Horizon
