Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! opened the 1995/96 season at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, New York. This production was co­produced with the Milwaukee Repertory Company, a fellow member of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT). More recently, Ah, Wilderness! was produced by Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont as part of its 1997/98 season.

What I hope to offer here is an overview of both productions in terms of the visual environment created by each theatre’s design team. Secondly, as a result of personal interviews with the directors of both shows, I will highlight the key values each director discovered in the play and the ways in which each attempted to realize them in production.

Studio Arena Theatre’s production of Ah, Wilderness!, directed by the theatre’s artistic director Gavin Cameron-Webb, was opulently, richly and lavishly produced. The setting, in particular, had the look and feel of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post illustration, replicated into a life-size three­dimensional ceramic sculpture, positioned atop a brilliantly polished square oak wood deck.

The Lincoln Center production, directed by Daniel Sullivan, was sparse, scaled-down, almost bare-boned. Scenically there was nothing elaborate, save what John Simon called the “free floating architrave” (New York, April 6, 1998) which created an overhang and backdrop for the production, allowing for a number of stunning lighting effects at various points in the play.

In both cases the directors and design teams traveled different roads on the journey to reach their final destination—the realization of the other world of the play on stage. Both productions were creative, artistic and critical successes as measured by audience standards. Both productions fulfilled this viewer’s expectations, and by the conclusion of the performance each engendered a warm, happy, and satisfied feeling of being alive.

As an audience member at both productions, I believe the different scenic design concepts worked because of the play itself and the values it espouses. Ah,, Wilderness! offers an idealized portrait of family life—a hard-working, responsible father, a stay-at-home mom who disciplines with love and kindness and understanding, aunts and uncles who are welcomed “live-in” guests, children who are relatively obedient and respectful of their elders, and young love that is innocent and pure. The play affirms the cycle of life and the rapture and bliss of being members not only of a united family but also of the cosmos. The play is a picture of what most people would like their life to have been when they were growing up (and which only a small percentage had actually experienced it to be).

Studio Arena and Lincoln Center approached Ah, Wilderness! from two different production perspectives, yet both successfully managed to realize the values espoused in this “comedy of recollection,” as O’Neill called it.

My involvement with Studio Arena’s production of Ah, Wilderness! extended beyond that of an audience member. A former student of mine who was the assistant to Gavin Cameron Webb and who was well aware of my interest in O’Neill became the catalyst for my being invited to give several pre­curtain presentations on O’Neill and the play to interested audience members. To prepare myself for this, I asked to be allowed to attend the first read-through and several early rehearsals. At the first meeting with the cast, the director spoke about the Miller family as the nostalgic apotheosis of what current day Republicans had in mind when they promised a “contract with America.” Here was a picture-perfect American family, living in relative peace and harmony, where the harsh realities of the outside world—so evident in Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde and Swinburne—never intrude.

To illustrate this idyllic picture of the past, the director/design team gave the production a framing device. The play was set in a present-day photographer’s studio where, presumably, scenes from an American family life, circa 1906, were being captured on film as if to be used for a series of advertisements for some slick, upscale, magazine. Gavin Cameron-Webb explained this approach in his Program Notes:

I am sure you have seen in the nation’s glossy magazines many advertisements for clothing, furniture and ornaments which are designed to evoke an idyllic past . . . [advertisements in which] a group of relaxed and comfortable people posed for the camera as if they were staring at us from another era. (Cameron-Webb, Playbill 7)

And so, at the beginning of every scene, a modern photographer, dressed completely in black, appeared on stage with assistants who set up the scene, positioned the actors, straightened the props, checked the lighting, and gave the signal for the picture to be taken. After a momentary freeze, the actors moved, dialogue commenced, and the action of the scene came to life. Consistent with this approach was the design of the set created by Robert Cothran.

The set, as previously described, resembled a Normal Rockwell Saturday Evening Post illustration replicated into a life-size three-dimensional sculpture. The exquisitely authentic-looking set pieces were positioned atop an octagon­shaped deck crafted from what appeared to be beautifully polished oak wood. The Miller sitting room, dining room and subsequent locations took place on this deck, which was positioned downstage center. The upstage portion of the main stage area and the back wall suggested an artist/photographer’s studio— a large, almost sterile space within which the turn of the century set and deck were placed.

The entire production of Ah, Wilderness! at Studio Arena was enormously engaging from a scenic and performance viewpoint (the entire play was beautifully and precisely cast). The only problem engendered by the framing device conceptualized by the director and design team was the length of time it took for the play to reach its end, which was very close to three hours in running time. Probably twenty to twenty-five minutes might have been trimmed if the photographer/artist and his crew did not open every scene of this three act, seven scene play crafted by O’Neill, who was notorious for writing plays of great length, to begin with, to test audience attention, perseverance and stamina.

I had the opportunity to interview Gavin Cameron-Webb on June 8, 1998 in his office at the theatre. The following is an edited transcript of the questions I asked and his responses to them.

QUESTION ONE: Did you undertake extensive research on the play before directing it?

Yes and no. I did some research regarding O’Neill’s biography and some research as to what was going on in the United States in 1906. Generally I tend not to do much research on a play itself and/or literary criticism of the text or other productions, because I find it muddies the waters and becomes confusing. I find the best research is reading the play over and over and over again. The play really is the thing.

QUESTION TWO: What do you perceive to be the values espoused by Ah, Wilderness!

The values implicit in the play are those of the family—the reason for its enduring popularity—and compassion, a respect for other people and their individuality, a respect for learning and education and growth. Most of those qualities are in Nat Miller, who leads us through the play even though we are following Richard’s journey. I think those are the main, real qualities of the play.

QUESTION THREE: O’Neill called the play a “comedy of recollection” for it represents what we all would like life to be. Do you agree?

Oh, yes, I think so. The Republican party would love all of that. It’s a very Republican play.

QUESTION FOUR: How does that idea and the values you already described carry over into the actual production of the play?

This is O’Neill’s only comedy. He seems to have written the truth about his family in the companion play Long Day’s Journey Into Night. In Ah, Wilderness! the playwright fashions a past that never existed. This is a fantasy. And all the virtues embodied in the play, which are very real and which are sometimes exhibited, and what we might strive for as an ideal, do not bear much resemblance to reality either now or back in 1906. This is an idyllic look at an upper middle class family with staff and servants. None of the issues or controversies of the day ever impinge on that idyllic setting. In that sense, it’s out of its social/historical context, really. The play is an ideal, what O’Neill would have loved his own life to have been as a boy growing up. Of course, it wasn’t anything like that.

It does seem to me now and it did seem to me then that much energy in our society is spent on persuading us to buy things. That for some reason we can manage to realize just this kind of ideal—this kind of life—if we buy the right washing machine, or the right suit of clothes, or the right car, or something like that. That is one of the fundamental principles of advertising, image advertising at the moment. It is about the image; it is not about the product. The advertising is the product; the stuff in the bottle is just a convenient way of collecting it. How many purchases are sold on image alone. And all the clothing ads for this idyllic past now—Ralph Lauren comes immediately to mind, but there are others—harking back to that wonderful past that never existed.

I wanted to be able to realize that idea on stage. So the conceptual setting was a series of photographs to be taken to sell a line of clothes in a modern context, and that would be our avenue into the play. And the reason was simple. It was just to show at once how attractive this is, this life of the Miller family in 1906, and secondly how entirely fake it is. That is not to suggest that the play is not incredibly seductive, nor the characters wonderfully drawn. That is not to say that we should ever stop striving toward this ideal, but we don’t get that by buying the right jacket, the right tie, the right pair of shoes, the right dress. That’s not the way we get there at all. And I think that’s the fallacy we fall into now ... our endless pursuit of money and wealth and the equation of wealth with wisdom and happiness, and the idea that you can buy that sort of life without having to do anything in and of yourself to make it happen.

QUESTION FIVE: Do you believe you realized all this in your production?

I think I would have preferred the modern sequence [the framing device] to have been a little more clear and clean cut. The stage space was very neutral. I had wanted to make it a little more political, to link it with the Republican dialogue that was going on at that particular time about how good the American family can be—the contract with America [ideology]. We weren’t able to realize that. [However], the play itself, the text, is so marvelous and so seductive that . . . [one] can’t help but be drawn to these characters, to their comedy, to their sometimes tragi-comic existence.

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Daniel Sullivan’s production of Ah, Wilderness! at the Vivian Beaumont Theater was a complete scenic contrast to that at Studio Arena. The set design by Thomas Lynch was, like the play itself, attractively simple, innocent, unaffected, serene and clean. Every scene occurred on a rectangular wooden platform that filled the downstage area of the Beaumont’s thrust stage. Behind this was a backdrop, similar in appearance to a “cinerama screen” on which projections were reflected. As Peter Marks noted in his New York Times review, “Sullivan underlines the fantasy by setting the play on . . . [an] open platform, with a few pieces of furniture, a wicker loveseat here, an overstuffed armchair there, to suggest a porch or living room in a comfortable turn-of-the­century Connecticut home.” In fact, Sullivan chose to place Act I, scenes i and ii and Act III, scene i on the porch of the Miller home, rather than in the Miller sitting room as prescribed by O’Neill. This directorial change allowed for even more simplicity as the only furnishings required to suggest the porch were a few pieces of green wicker furniture.

The most complicated the visual design for the play ever became was in Act II, which calls for two locations, one in town and one in the home. Even here the designer deftly and efficiently negotiated the transitions. Both scenes transpired on the rectangular platform which was split in two by a screen divider, the stage-left side was the back room of a bar in a small hotel, and the stage-right side the sitting room of the Miller home. The bar consisted of a table, two chairs, and a player piano which was positioned at the upstage-left end of the platform. The sitting room consisted of two armchairs, an ottoman, and a writing desk which was positioned at the upstage right end of the platform.

The simplicity of the set was counterbalanced by the extremely effective, often stunning lighting effects created by Peter Kaczorowski. Reflected on the cyclorama-“architrave” were images suggesting, at various times throughout the play, fireworks exploding, the brilliance of an early morning summer sunrise, the allure of the night moon ascending, and beacons flashing to guide night visitors to the deserted beach. For the back lighting of Act I Kaczorowski used hues of purple, for Act II hot pink, for the opening of Act III sky blue, and for Richard and Muriel’s rendezvous at the beach and the final scene back home shades of violet.

Atmospherically, the most seductive moment of the production came toward the very end of the play. Taking his cue from Nat’s question to Essie about where the family is, director Sullivan brought back on stage all members of the family for a final tableau—Sid and Lily return from the band concert at the beach, Arthur from visiting Elsie Rand, Mildred from her walk with her latest beau and, of course, Nat, Essie and Richard are already positioned on stage. Father and mother stare out through the window at their son Richard, who is standing on the piazza, gazing up at the moon. The spell which the moon has cast upon Richard slowly worked its magic on everyone present, including the audience. As everyone in the family stared up and out to the left, enchanted by the night moon, the audience, too, saw what they saw reflected on the upstage cyclorama. In that one glorious moment, we became conscious that we are all God’s creatures under the same moon, part of the same cosmos, sharing, like the Millers, the night moon, a sense of family, love and an inexorable belief in the beauty of the human condition.

I had the opportunity to interview director Daniel Sullivan in New York City on September 12, 1998. His responses to my questions about his production of Ah, Wilderness! are as follow:

Question One: What values do you believe are implicit in the play which still speak to audiences today?

Even though O’Neill said the play is a picture of a vanished time, a past that is dead to us, I myself do not feel this is true. There is something in the play that is universal and it has to do with maintaining a balance within the family. One of the reasons why we chose our approach to the play was, in a way, to take away the visualization of the turn-of-the-century ... to relate the play as much as we could to our own time. [For example], I have children. I’ve gone through the same thing Nat and Essie have gone through, although maybe for slightly different reasons. I’ve had to deal with my own son playing with liquor for the first time, experiencing his first date [and first love]. I think that kids, regardless of the time, go through exactly the same [stages of exploration and development]. There’s something about that [process] that I think is universal and everyone can relate to, which is why we made the production simple.

Question Two: Did you have that in mind before going into rehearsals, the idea that you wanted to keep it simple?

Well, it was both conceptual and also a necessity, because Lincoln Center wanted to do a cheap production.

Question Three: In contrast to yours, Gavin’s production at Studio Arena was very opulent, and the theatre received lots of money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and some assistance from a co-sponsor. Ah, Wilderness! was Studio Arena’s season opener and they put all their monetary eggs in that basket.

Well, if you do a four-set play, that’s more expensive. I also felt that on a thrust stage you don’t want to drag out a lot of lumber. You need to be as graceful in transitions as you possibly can make them, so that the focus will always be on the people and not the physical set.

Question Four: I felt you realized this beautifully in the transition from Act III, scene i (the beach) to scene iii (the home). You had Richard and Muriel slowly crossing out (from downstage right to upstage left) while Sid and Lily crossed in and then out, upstage, from left to right. The picture you created contrasting the innocence of young love and the experience of “seasoned” love foreshadowed Nat’s line at the end of the play when he says: “Spring isn’t everything . . . Autumn’s got beauty, too . . . if you’re together.” And then the final scene began, in the Miller bedroom as opposed to the sitting room as specified in the text. Why?

Well, for lots of reasons. Number one, I didn’t want to go back to that sitting room again. I feel that one of the reasons that the play occasionally feels long is that you keep going back there over and over again, and it’s not an evocative space. [I wanted the audience to see] a sexual, loving relationship between the parents and the sort of practical love that bonds. I think there’s something very moving seeing the two of them sitting there, watching their son through the bedroom window gazing at the moon, remembering their own foolish passions. You can’t get that feeling from a living room.