A Long, Strange Interlude’s Journey Into Wilderness

Seeing Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! with the APT this past weekend was a bit strange. Something kept nagging at me as I was watching it. The light and airy pleasantry of O’Neill’s only real comedy flitted across a pleasant outdoor stage in the middle of a summer’s day matinee, but some part of me kept being reminded of parallels with another O’Neill play—A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I saw a production of THAT in a basement in Milwaukee about a year prior to seeing Wilderness outdoors. (Conerstone Theatre did a production fo it in the basement of the Brumder Mansion, a nice space that nevertheless has a completely different atmosphere than the APT's) Both are polar opposite ends of O’Neill as an autobiographical playwright. Seeing the two couldn’t possibly have resulted in two more opposite theatre experiences, but there were so many parallels in the way O’Neill presented the two that had me having strange hallucinations during the APT show . . . here’s the idea:

O’Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! as a light commercial comedy that was an idealized vision of his childhood. It takes place with a family on vacation during the Fourth of July.

O’Neill wrote A Long Day’s Journey Into Night towards the end of his life. He was so obsessed about seeing to it that it never surfaced in the general vicinity of his lifespan that he had legal documents written-up to ensure that the play not even be published until 25 years after his death. This was O’Neill being honest about himself and his family over the course of a day somewhere in summer’s end. This was the kind of chronically depressing O’Neill everybody knows and loves. The people here are all quite unsavory, but they all have some kind of parallel to characters in O’Neill’s only comedy.

Somewhere in the summer heat, I had strange visions of characters shifting from one play to the other mid-act. The O’Neill analogue in Wilderness might be saying something to another character in the ensemble, turn to glance briefly at the audience and tumble into a some sort of monologue from Strange Interludes that goes into nauseating detail about personal feelings as they apply to every aspect of the play and it will all twist into a far darker scene from Long Day’s Journey. A few beats later, the same thing would happen again in reverse. It would be a manic-depressive presentation of O'Neill that could cycle as rapidly as a director wanted. And somewhere in my consciousness, I knew what I was imagining was all in my head, but  I couldn’t help thinking about how strange and jarring the juxtaposition was. And I couldn’t help but think about how fascinating it might be to fuse the three plays . . .