Ah, Wilderness!

The most luminous production at the Utah Shakespearean Festival this season is Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, a gentle family portrait dramatically different from the tragic depictions he usually penned. Although O'Neill calls the play "a comedy of recollection," wish fulfillment describes it more accurately. This is the family O'Neill would like to have had rather than his dysfunctional real one (indelibly chronicled later in Long Day's Journey Into Night). Ah, Wilderness! is a poignant, bittersweet chronicle of a young man experiencing first love and adolescent angst in the midst of a large and loving family. Young Richard Miller (Jason Michael Spelbring) has two passions: the books he's just discovered and Muriel (Denise Montgomery), his high school sweetheart. When he pirates quotes from one to write love letters to the other, he raises the wrath of Muriel's conservative father (Phil Hubbard).

The play's title comes from The Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam, Richard's favorite poem, which explores the tension between wilderness and paradise -- in this case, isolation and perfect contentment -- which Richard encounters in his own family: his articulate, understanding father, Nat (Philip Davidson); his sensible, nurturing mother, Essie (Libby George); his well-meaning, alcoholic Uncle Sid (Joe Cronin); his straitlaced spinster Aunt Lily (Leslie Brott); and his siblings, Arthur (Danforth Comins), Mildred (Laura Morache), and Tommy (alternately played by McCabe Nickerson and McKay Tripp). The wonder of O'Neill's writing is that each character, no matter how minor, is individually and incisively etched, including the Millers' mischievous maid, Norah (Jacquelyn Baker) and a sweet, sympathetic whore, Belle (Melinda Pfundstein), whom Richard meets in a local bar. As the family members celebrate a typical Fourth of July, O'Neill captures the rhythms and the myriad joys and disappointments of their everyday lives.

James Edmondson's resonant production burns with the incandescence of a remembered dream, courting nostalgia without ever lapsing into the trite or overly sentimental. Thomas Umfrid's framework set, with its wooden walls and wicker furniture, is open and airy, and K. L Alberts's turn-of-the-century costumes are a symphony in ecru, beige, light brown, tan, and salmon. Linda Essig's lighting is warm and soft. The performances are uniformly fine, but Cronin's compassionate Sid, Davidson's bumbling, supportive Nat, Spelbring's emotional roller coaster of a Richard, and especially George's Essie stand out. In Libby George's hands, Essie becomes the centering hearth flame that holds the entire family together.