Sweet Dreams

By Gina Mallet

AH, WILDERNESS!

by EUGENE O'NEILL

Directed by ARVIN BROWN

It seems ironic that Ireland should have given hostile England a series of witty literary geniuses while its gift to friendly America was Eugene O'Neill. Distrusting both people and words, O'Neill was an unlikely dramatist whose literal mind made him work out everything for himself. In his earlier plays he achieved repetitiveness, instead of the cumulative force of the late ones. A three-hour trifle in the O'Neill canon, Ah, Wilderness! was written in 1933. A comedy, it describes how, on July 4, 1906, 17-year-old Dick Miller (Richard Backus) began to grow up. That was the day he fell in love, was spurned, got drunk and realized that his parents were, after all, human.

Meticulous Revival. Tame stuff, until the audience realizes that this is a fantasy of wish fulfillment. The Millers are the family O'Neill would have preferred to those refugees from the House of Atreus with whom he was actually saddled. Throughout the play there are wood-notes of despair that provide a counterpoint, hinting that the Millers have within them the same talent for self-destruction as the Tyrones of O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night. With bad luck, comforting Mother Essie might become junkie Mary Tyrone; responsible Father Nat could turn into drunken James. These nuances were obviously hidden from O'Neill himself--or he would have undoubtedly hammered them out into the open, thereby robbing the play of its warm and lyrical humor.

No implication is lost in the metic ulous revival at the Long Wharf Theater, which tenderly evokes the Millers' tribal intimacy. Even so, the play could have been cut. Dick is too fragile a character to sustain interest, and his mooncalfing is made graceless by O'Neill's wooden dialogue. But Arvin Brown's staging has a rich visual impact reminiscent of Fellini. A dwarf of a maid scuttles around the dinner table, which is dominated by a jolly drunken uncle (John Braden) sucking on lobster shells. Button-nosed Spinster Teresa Wright alternately gig gles and blushes in a new dress while Geraldine Fitzgerald presides as super-mother, projecting the presence of a queen, whatever the state of her court's dishevelment.

Gina Mallet

As a 24-year-old Yale drama school graduate, Arvin Brown was "burning to direct" when in 1965 he helped start the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn. And for his own professional debut in the converted warehouse in the city's food terminal, he bit off what most veterans fear to chew, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey, perhaps America's best play.

The kind of self-assurance--or nerve--required of a novice to present O'Neill's impacted four-hour masterpiece became critically important in 1967 when Brown took over as the financially strapped theater's artistic director. From the start, he made it a playwrights' company, in contrast to New Haven's other theater, the Yale Repertory Theater, which emphasizes technical experimentation. A fiction writer in his college days, Brown says: "I like language in the theater, and I don't believe theater is at its best as mime or dance."

His eclectic, adventurous choice of plays soon put Long Wharf into the forefront of regional theaters. Brown himself emerged as a likely heir to the late Tyrone Guthrie, the swashbuckling repertory advocate who in 1958 moved to Minneapolis and fired up the U.S. regional-theater movement. Apart from the obligatory classics, Brown digs out such unlikely playwrights as D.H. Lawrence (The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd) and Maxim Gorky (Country People). "Gorky's plays are particularly interesting today. His people are activists, revolutionaries."

Brown's most valuable knack is for picking new plays. Long Wharfs productions of David Storey's The Changing Room, about a lower-class rugby match, and The Contractor, which literally raises a tent around contemporary alienation, moved to Broadway to win, respectively, the Drama Critics Circle best-play awards of 1972 and 1973. Brown may complete the hat trick this year with Peter Nichols' black comedy The National Health. These plays are all British. Brown, who receives 20 scripts a week, is regretful but firm about his evident Anglophilia. "I have not yet found American playwrights so honest or committed as Storey or Nichols."

A compact dynamo who hums with confidence, Los Angeles-born Brown admits to being incurably stagestruck. At age nine, he attended a performance by French Singer Edith Piaf. He can still feel her impact: "She suffered more than anyone could." Too self-conscious to be an actor, he says: "It used to worry me. Now I think it is my strongest asset because I have had to develop a method of communication that does not include illustration." He leaves actors alone, but "they can show me anything." He never comments on a character, instead draws out a motivation from the actor. "I do not believe actors are children or dumb. They are complex people with sensibilities equal to mine in a different direction." Says Geraldine Fitzgerald, whose appearance in Ah, Wilderness! is one of several she has made with the company: "He reminds me of Max Reinhardt, with whom I worked in Sons and Soldiers in 1943. For both of them, the theater is acting. Arvin never puts down actors or upstages them."

Before Joseph Papp took over New York's problem-plagued Vivian Beaumont Theater in 1973, Brown was considered for the job, but insists he would not have taken it. Says he: "The director of Lincoln Center is a driven man." He adds, "I think all good work in the theater comes from relaxation. At Long Wharf I have New York exposure when I want it and a board of directors who understand that theater today, like opera and ballet, is not going to make money." Although Long Wharf now plays to 90% capacity in an eight-month season, it has a mulish deficit of $400,000. Still, Brown, an optimist, sees a trend being reversed. "Two successful theaters have made New Haven as a theater town. Why, people here are more inclined to see a play than a film. It's an American miracle!" sbGina Mallet

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