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Ah! Wilderness!
Tower Players performance of O'Neill is a must-see
By Susannah Luthi
Assistant News Editor
Eugene O'Neill,
America's Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, wrote
dramas that were largely psychological studies-dark, deep and
heavy.
But he must have smiled sometimes,
in one case writing Ah! Wilderness as a result.
Ah! Wilderness, which opened last
night as the Tower Players' first production of the season,
plays out in the comic unraveling of American life (on, of all
days, the Fourth of July), which in the end only strong family
ties can bring back together.
The play is essentially a comedy,
though it is not memorably witty and certainly not slapstick.
But it is real, adding up all the oddities of family turmoil
into a story that is both absurd and poignant.
Its protagonist is the idealist
teenager, Richard Miller (played by Mitchell A. Koory in a convincingly
blundering way), who toys with socialism, love poetry, heartbreak
and alcohol and ends back where he began-only with a little
more of an idea of his own foolishness.
Amy Jokinen, perhaps the most
dynamic actor in the cast, plays Richard's mother, Essie Miller,
who is at once narrow-minded and very generous. Despite her
foibles, her insistence on maintaining a gracious way of living
is clear. And though she makes herself ridiculous by denouncing
the works of Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Swinburne and Ibsen as immoral
trash (in a very motherly fashion), she also lights on Richard's
absurdities and lampoons them to his face.
Kyle Wilson captures the archetypal,
prosperous American father, who has lived long enough to find
Richard's romanticism absurdly incongruous with the aforementioned
works of Wilde, Shaw, Swinburne and Ibsen. The father also knows
his boy well enough to hesitate clouding his world ("He's
so innocent inside"-despite all his "book talk.").
This production does begin slowly
and fails to build the tension between characters immediately.
In fact, there are times in the first scene when the various
family members' actions and words seem to pass by the others.
But in the second scene it all
begins to cohere as the various members of the Miller family
come together and open up over a "blue fish" and lobster
dinner, during which MO Simpson, as the token drunk bachelor
Sid, expands the comedy in every line. In fact, if there is
one scene that captures everything that is brilliant about the
play, this is it.
And, if that scene is the play
in a moment, Ah! Wilderness is a life in a day, exploring all
the elements of what is beautiful and ridiculous about a young
man's coming of age in his family and community.
Through his melodramatic broodings
Richard Miller learns a little about literature; through his
mistakes, through his love letters, he learns a little about
girls (even the wilder ones); and through his adventure at a
sordid "beach house" he learns a little about differentiating
the judgments of his conscience and conventional morality.
And, in the end even Essie opens
her mind, and confesses to finding "deep things" in
Richard's books.
But most importantly, and what
Koory, Jokinen and Wilson portray so well in the final scene,
the family opens up the love that unites the melodramatic, the
comic, the foolish, the sensible and the wise into a richly-varied
picture that gives us some order to live by.
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Tyler Horning/Collegian
Essie Miller (Amy Jokinen,
L), her husband Nat (Kyle Wilson), son Richard (Mitchell Koory)
and sister-in-law Lilly (Eily Hallagar) face yet another crisis.
Tyler Horning/Collegian
Arthur (Ryan Walsh), the
debonaire older son and Yale undergraduate, knows everything
there is to know.
Tyler Horning/Collegian
Lilly Miller (Eily Hallagan,
L) and her sister-in-law Essie (Amy Jokinen) are ready for
the Fourth of July festivities.
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