✭✭✭✭✭<b>
</b><b>by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Joseph Ziegler
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 29-October 8, 2004</b><b>
</b>
"Ah, Wonderful!"
The Shaw Festival’s first production of a play by Eugene O’Neill is a triumph for all concerned. Those who know O’Neill only from his harrowing family drama “A Long Day’s Journey into Night” may have doubts about what a comedy from this author might be like. Cast those doubts away. If “Long Day’s Journey” portrayed O’Neill’s family life as it was, “Ah, Wilderness!” portrays it as he would like it to have been. The play written in 1932 but set in 1906 when O’Neill like the main character Richard was 17, is suffused with the glow of nostalgia. The darker undercurrents of human nature that O’Neill foregrounds in his other work, are here kept at bay. The play celebrates love between parents, parent and child, boy and girl, with an unmatched richness of observation. This detail is fully expressed in Joseph Ziegler’s wonderful warm production and in the finely nuanced acting of the entire cast.
It is July 4th in a small town in Connecticut not unlike New London, where O’Neill’s own family had their summer home. On this Independence Day the O’Neill figure Richard seeks his own independence from the “old-fogeyism” he thinks his family, town and country represent. His reading of such radical thinkers as Wilde, Shaw, Swinburne, and “The Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam have shown him “life as it really is” and this is the life he wants to lead, not the life of middle-class convention. The irony of Richard’s rebellion is that his notion of “real life” is based entirely on books not on experience. His love for the girl Muriel is completely idealized. His first encounter with alcohol and loose women hilariously show how unprepared he is.
In counterpoint to Richard’s first taste of love and life is stalled romance between mother’s brother Sid and his father’s sister Lily. Though they have always loved each other, Lily will not agree to marry Sid until he reforms. But Sid is an alcoholic and can’t help himself when temptation is near. Unlike in the main plot, forgiveness offers no solution to the basic problem. Ziegler wisely presents this relationship as the bitter, tragic one it is, knowing that comedy gains in depth when it deals with the widest range of emotions.
Jared Brown is a real find as the O’Neill figure, Richard Miller. He captures the wonderful mixture of naiveté, awkwardness and overconfidence that makes this portrait of a teenager so real and so loveable. He can proudly denounce those around him for knowing nothing of “real life” when his only examples of it are from literature. When later he does encounter “real life” in the form of bartenders and prostitutes, he’s hilariously unprepared for it. All throughout Brown gets the difficult balance of Richard’s outward bravado undercut by inner doubt just right. He’s certainly an actor to watch in the future.
Ziegler has well cast Richard’s parents. Wendy Thatcher is his mother Essie, whose attempts at sternness cover up her indulgence of her children, and Norman Browning is his father Nat, who shows real feeling beneath all the bluster, made even funnier by Browning’s trademark sotto voce muttering. He makes the scene when the flustered Nat incoherently tells Richard the facts of life truly hilarious. In contrast, Mary Haney’s Lily is a woman long inured to disappointment. The smile that slowly fades when she hears the drunken Sid singing in the distance is heartbreaking. William Vickers’ Sid is an exterior of jokes and laughs that hides a fundamental self-hatred.
In the bar scene of Act 2 Graeme Somerville as the tough Irish bartender, Lisa Norton as Belle, the prostitute so puzzled by Richard’s chaste behaviour, and Michael Ball as a lubricious travelling salesman instantly create and atmosphere far removed from the warmth of the Millers’ home life. From all of the actors, Ziegler draws highly detailed, naturalistic performances, though Maggie Blake as Richard’s girlfriend Muriel tends to force her voice thus creating an undesirable note of artifice.
Christina Poddubiuk has created beautiful period costumes for the piece that instantly reflect not just the time, place and season of the action but the personality of the characters. Lighting designer Alan Brodie’s palette ranges from the warmth of interiors especially during the big family dinner to the coldness of the bar and the chilly isolation of Richard and Muriel’s meeting at the beach.
“Ah, Wilderness” is a portrait of a family confronting the inevitability of change as one of the children grows up. Ziegler and the cast perfectly capture the pervasive mood of celebration on this Independence Day, paradoxically, of the dependence that family and friends rely on to get them through life. It’s hard not to get a lump in your throat during this glowing production that shows that parents and children can actually communicate with each other despite everything they say and do.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Mary Haney and Jeff Lillico. ©2004 Andrée Lauthier.
<b>2004-09-20</b>
<b>Ah, Wilderness!</b>