AH, WILDERNESS! by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Michael O’Neill
First performed on Broadway in 1933, this nostalgic comedy presents a sentimental tale of youthful indiscretion in a small Connecticut town during a Fourth of July celebration in 1905. In sharp contrast to the gloom of the Nobel Prize Winner’s tragedies, O’Neill’s only comedy is a joyous and humorous depiction of American family life at the turn of the century. The play, as well as its successful 1935 film adaptation, is a sweet—but not saccharine— valentine to a simpler time in America, during the halcyon days before the World Wars. The play can be poignantly embraced as a fantasy of the happy childhood O’Neill never had, the flip side of the painful family portrait he shared with all of us in his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night.