SYNOPSIS 
The play takes place on July 4, 1906.  There had yet to be any World Wars or Great Depression. The Wright brothers had just started flying and Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company. The world’s first radio broadcast occurred and an 8.25 earthquake devastated San Francisco.

In Ah, Wilderness! the characters conjure an idyllic life at the beginning of this century. Ned Miller owns the local, small-town newspaper. His wife Essie runs their middle-class household, which includes not only four children, but also his spinster sister Lily and her life-of-the-party ne'er-do-well brother, Sid. Teenage son Richard – almost surely representing O'Neill himself – is the center of attention. Richard’s youthful exuberance over all things love, poetry and politics both challenges the family’s conventions and embraces the turning tide of the times. 

PRODUCTION HISTORY
Ah, Wilderness! was a departure for O’Neill’s usual work. In 1932, he was struggling with a third draft for his religious-themed play Days Without End and decided to take a break from it when he awoke one morning with the outline for Ah, Wilderness! He wrote it in just a few weeks, with little revision once the draft was done.

In sharp contrast to the gloom of his tragedies, Ah, Wilderness! is a joyous and humorous depiction of American family life at the turn of the century.The play was first produced on Broadway on October 2, 1933 at the Guild Theatre by The Theatre Guild, where it ran for 289 performances. The cast included George M. Cohan (Nat), Elisha Cook, Jr. (Richard), Marjorie Marquis (Essie), and Eugene Lockhart (Sid). In 1933, San Francisco’s Curran Theatre featured the production starring Will Rogers.  Ah, Wilderness! was revived four times on Broadway - 1941, 1975, in 1988 with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst, and again in 1991.

The story was also made into the 1959 Broadway musical Take Me Along starring Jackie Gleason as the drunken Uncle Sid, Walter Pidgeon as Nat and Robert Morse as Richard. The production ran for 448 performances. Gleason won the 1960 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Ah, Wilderness! was made into a 1935 film of the same title and again in 1948 as the musical Summer Holiday, starring Mickey Rooney.

PLAYWRIGHT
Eugene O’ Neill (1888-1953) was among the first playwrights to introduce realism into American drama, a technique usually associated with the likes of Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg. His plays were known to involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism, always featuring edgy characters struggling to fulfill their dreams while living outside mainstream society.

As a young adult, O’Neill suffered from alcoholism and depression and began writing and traveling extensively as a means of escape.  In 1912, after 6 months spent in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full time to writing plays. His major works include Beyond The Horizon – for which he was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize - The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra and Ah, Wilderness! – his only well-known comedy. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After a 10-year pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and did not gain recognition as being among his best works until decades later. After suffering from multiple health problems (including depression and alcoholism) over many years O'Neill died in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65.

COMMENTS FROM EUGENE O’ NEILL

In a letter to his son Eugene Jr., O’Neill said of Ah, Wilderness!: “It has a very little plot. It is more the capture of a mood, an evocation [of] the spirit of a time that is dead now with all its ideals manners and codes-- the period in which my middle 'teens' were spent. There is very little autobiographical about it... It is not a play one can explain. Perhaps if I give you a subtitle you will sense the spirit of what I've tried to recapture in it: 'A Nostalgic Comedy of the Ancient Days when Youth was Young, and the Right was Right, and Life was a Wicked Opportunity.' Yes it is a comedy--and not in the satiric vein like [my] Macro Millions--and not deliberately spoofing at the period... But hell, that doesn't say what I mean. It's in the mood of the play, as you'll see when you read it. The point is, it's new ground for me.”