Slow pleasures

A luxurious Ah, Wilderness!

by Robert von Stein Redick

Ah, Wilderness! plays through August 24
at the Theater at Monmouth. Call (207) 933-9999.

Question: what's Eugene O'Neill's idea of good comic material? Answer: a clown with a crippling addiction.

The joke is not entirely warranted, but it captures the incongruous sensation one feels upon hearing gags actually penned by the author of those leviathan tragedies Long Days Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill, the only US dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize, grew up in a household of alcoholism, opium habits, madness, and slow despair: stories he would eventually bring to the American stage in all their horror. In the landscape of comedy he was an innocent abroad.

Indeed, he made the journey but once -- as a brief holiday from the more typical gloom of Days Without End, a prodigious flop commissioned by the New York Theatre Guild. But the sunny interlude Ah, Wilderness! went on to do very well. It is no screamer, but it's as wholesome and hopeful an experience as anything one is likely to find in American theater. In Barbara Bosch's thoughtful production at Monmouth, the piece's quiet graces are realized in full.

It's the Fourth of July, no less, in a cozy Connecticut farmhouse in 1906. The Monmouth stage succinctly evokes the modest good fortune of the Miller family: a hazy watercolor backdrop of the unassuming home, a narrow loveseat, highbacked chairs, a secretary desk crammed with bills. Drifting on in no particular hurry, the Millers are as decorous as the set: the fiftysomething father (Mark S. Cartier), balding, precise in word and movement, wears a formal waistcoat even on holiday. Mrs. Miller (Corinne Edgerly) and her spinster sister-in-law Lily (Janis Stevens) are exquisite in bone-china dresses with lace collars; the children are stuffed in convincingly uncomfortable suits. There's chatter about firecrackers, girlfriends, a drive in the country. The peace is thick enough to slice.

What's really happening? Nothing at all, until the last child, the romantic and brainy Richard (Joshua Scharback) is called down to a kind of instant court-martial. First offense: suspicious books, including one by that awful Mr. Wilde, caught "committing bigamy" as eldest brother Arthur (Luke Hancock) declares. Second offense: wooing the daughter of the local dry-goods tycoon Mr. McComber (Jon Miller) with love poetry. The balder and even stiffer McComber appears to level this charge in person, armed with a letter from his daughter sending Richard and his puppy-love to the dogs.

Believe it or not, this pulse-pounding stuff isn't Ah, Wilderness's selling point. The play simply does not deliver any emotional (or for that matter, comic) knockout punches. What's left? In a word, luxury. O'Neill's play moves with slow confidence and a love of gesture, both to a degree unthinkable in today's theater. Fully six characters take the stage for pivotal scenes and never return. Stage time is lavished on children whose presence affects the plot not one iota. There's even a three-course meal -- soup, bluefish, and lobster! -- the sprawling preparations for which are longer than whole scenes in contemporary plays.

Surprisingly, this all feels long but not tedious. The prime saving grace is the cast, all 15 of which are superb at drawing out O'Neill's grace and, yes, humor. Hard-drinking Uncle Sid (David Greenham) is not particularly funny when he tells a joke. But he is very funny once enlisted to the supposedly serious task of containing Richard's fixation on McComber's daughter. "You're right!" he declares, pocketing one of the juicier love poems behind the father's back. "It won't do him getting some decent girl in trouble." Baby-faced Scharback, the evening's designated straight man, is maudlin and exaggerated as only a well-read adolescent can be. And Edgerly's physical energy made the drive from Portland worthwhile all by itself. Waiting up for Richard, out drowning his passions in booze, her nearsighted struggle with needlepoint becomes a glorious agony. When she pricks her finger, the whole room jumps.

These are the charms that compel. A last example: when Mrs. Miller asks for the time, Lily lifts a pin dangling from her breast, and tells her. A breast-pin watch! Unquestionably a minor detail. But it is in such details one can so happily and thoroughly lose oneself.

Such a payoff is not for everyone, and more contemporary values just aren't on the menu: there's not a whiff of epiphany in Wilderness, for example. Instead, there's confirmation of what O'Neill, savaged as he was, still called "the bosom of the family." There's a tenderness for a childhood denied him. And there's a reminder of days before television bequeathed us all a many-times magnified narcissism, when educated people called liquor "Dutch courage" without self-consciousness, and both humor and wisdom were spun out of modest cloth.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.