Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O’Neill

By Eugene O’Neill Directed by Douglas C. Wager Spring 2002 Guthrie on Tour Study Guides are made possible by STUDY GUIDE T H E G U T H R I E T H E A T E R J O E D O W L I N G Artistic Director The Guthrie Theater receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts. This activity is made possible in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature. The Minnesota State Arts Board received additional funds to support this activity from the National Endowment for the Arts. ============================================================================================================ Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O’Neill With this production, the Guthrie honors the generosity of Target, Marshall Field's Project Imagine and the National Endowment for the Arts with support from the Heartland Arts Fund. =============================================================================================================== A S T U D Y G U I D E published by The Guthrie Theater Senior Editor: Michael Lupu Editor: Belinda Westmaas Jones Research: Dramaturg: Michael Maletic Kate Bredeson Jason Brown Sam Chase Produced with the support of: Jo Holcomb Jo Holcomb Belinda Westmaas Jones Sheila Livingston Michael Lupu Catherine McGuire Michael Maletic Julie McMerty Shane R. Mueller Carla Steen Patricia Vaillancourt Website Layout and Maintenance: Patricia Vaillancourt All rights reserved. No part of this Study Guide may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials published herein are written especially for our Guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their publishers. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHRONOLOGY Selected Chronology of the Life and Times of Eugene O’Neill 4 THE PLAYWRIGHT Inescapable Dramatic Force: Comments about the Playwright 12 THE PLAY Synopsis 15 “The Last Play They Would Ever Suspect Me of Writing” O’Neill on Ah, Wilderness! 16 Forgiving Life: Critical Comments on the Play 18 Selections from Richard’s Reading List 21 GLOSSARY A Selected Glossary 25 THE GUTHRIE PRODUCTION Family Ties: Comments by the Director, Douglas Wager 31 Setting the Physical World: Comments on the Set Design by Ming Cho Lee 32 Remembrance of Times Past: Comments on the Costume Designs by Zack Brown 33 When the Lights Come Up: Comments on the Lighting Design by Allen Lee Hughes 34 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION Suggested Topics 35 ADDITIONAL SOURCES For Further Reading 37 3 CHRONOLOGY A Selected Chronology Of The Life And Times Of Eugene O'Neill O’Neill’s Life Events in America and Abroad 1888 Eugene Gladstone O’Neill is born October The National Geographic Society is 16 in a New York City hotel room, son of established and the first National James O’Neill, a prominent Irish-American Geographic Magazine is published. stage actor, and Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill, daughter of a wealthy Ohio family. 1889- O’Neill accompanies his father on extensive The Wall Street Journal is established 1894 tours of The Count of Monte Cristo. The (1889). family spends its summers at “Monte Cristo cottage” in New London, Connecticut, a Emily Dickinson's poems are published “large small-town” similar to that depicted posthumously by her sister (1890). in Ah, Wilderness!. 200 members of the Sioux tribe are killed at the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890). 1895 O’Neill is enrolled in New York’s Academy Sears, Roebuck Company opens a mail- of Mt. St. Vincent boarding school. order business. Sears and Montgomery Ward will soon revolutionize the purchase and distribution of goods in America. 1900 O’Neill attends the De La Salle Institute, a L. Frank Baum publishes The Wonderful Christian boarding school in New York Wizard of Oz, which he adapts as a stage City. He remains there for two years. play the following year. Carrie Nation leads women’s temperance groups in violent protests against establishments which serve liquor. Kodak sells its “Brownie” camera for one dollar, popularizing amateur photography. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is published. 1902 O’Neill enters Betts Academy, a The Wright brothers make their successful nondenominational Connecticut private flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. school. It is here that he first begins to write poetry and read drama. The Sherman Anti-trust Act is passed. U.S. Congress authorizes the Panama Canal project. 1903 O’Neill learns of his mother’s morphine United Mine Workers’ strike leads to a 4 addiction after her attempt to drown herself dramatic rise in coal prices. Responding in the river near their cottage. He frequents to public outcry, the government settles the Unique Book Shop in New York, where the dispute, accepting many union he immerses himself in radical political demands. tracts and the progressive social criticism of the writings of Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes is appointed to Nietzsche, Swinburne and Edward the U.S. Supreme Court. He supports Fitzgerald among others. public interests over corporate profits. At 15, O’Neill develops a drinking habit Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, a that he will battle throughout his life. novel exposing unhealthy practices in the meat packing industry. The motion picture, The Great Train Robbery, is produced. 1906 O’Neill enrolls at Princeton University, but Federal troops are sent to Atlanta, Georgia is dismissed at the end of his first year to quell race riots in the South. because of “poor academic standing.” He later describes his experience at Princeton An earthquake levels vast portions of San as “all play and no work.” Francisco. U.S. Congress passes consumer safety legislation including the Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act. 1909 O’Neill is so impressed with a production of The National Association for the Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler starring Alla Advancement of Colored People Nazimova that he sees it ten times. (NAACP) is founded. James O’Neill sends his son on a mining expedition in Honduras in order to separate him from Kathleen Jenkins, a young girl who is pregnant with O’Neill’s child. Before his departure, O’Neill marries Jenkins in secret. 1910 A victim of malaria, O’Neill returns home Halley’s Comet passes safely by the earth to New York. Upon regaining his health he during its 84-year cycle despite departs again, this time to Buenos Aires widespread fears that it would destroy our aboard a sailing vessel. His experiences on planet. the ship provide the inspiration for the sea plays he will write years later. The Boy Scouts of America and The Campfire Girls are established. O’Neill’s first son, Eugene O’Neill Jr., is born to Kathleen Jenkins. The Father’s Day holiday is first introduced in Washington, D.C. O’Neill returns to New York and resides at 5 Jimmy-the-Priest’s saloon and boarding house in lower Manhattan where he will stay for several years. This realm of drunken derelicts will later form the setting for The Iceman Cometh and Anna Christie. 1912 Severe depression over his unsuccessful The British luxury liner, Titanic, sinks in career in poetry, compounded by heavy the Atlantic during its voyage to America. drinking, leads O’Neill to attempt suicide at 1,500 passengers die. Jimmy-the-Priest’s. U.S. Congress passes the 17th O’Neill tours with his father’s theater Amendment, imposing income tax. company, acting in small roles and serving as assistant manager. Deserted by O’Neill, Kathleen Jenkins obtains a divorce. O’Neill is hospitalized for tuberculosis at Shelton, Connecticut’s state sanatorium. 1913 O’Neill moves from the state sanatorium to The Ford Motor Company builds the first Wellington, Connecticut’s Gaylord Farm moving assembly line. The 40-hour work Sanatorium. During his half-year stay there, week is established. he writes eight one-act plays and his first full length play, Bread and Butter. New York City hosts the “Armory Show,” an international modern art exhibit. 1914 James O’Neill funds the publication of his The Austrian declaration of war on Serbia son’s one-act plays, collectively titled Thirst sparks several counter-declarations across and Other One Act Plays. Europe, marking the official beginning of World War I. Veteran drama scholar George Pierce Baker admits O’Neill into his dramatic writing workshop at Harvard University. 1916 O’Neill and several of his contemporaries, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa leads among them playwright Susan Glaspell and attacks on the Southern U.S. designer Robert Edmund Jones, found the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod. At the Lenin and his Bolshevik party seize power Wharf Theatre the fledgling company stages in St. Petersburg, marking the initial O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff and impetus of the next year’s Russian Thirst. socialist revolution. Later that year, O’Neill makes his New Norman Rockwell creates his first cover York debut when Bound East for Cardiff for The Saturday Evening Post. and Before Breakfast are produced. O’Neill visits Russia to observe the 6 revolution with friends John Reed and Louise Bryant. 1917 In New York, The Provincetown Players The U.S. enters World War I, and produce Fog, The Sniper, In the Zone, Ile, congress authorizes the military draft. and The Long Voyage Home. Prohibition of liquor becomes U.S. law under the 18th Amendment. 1918 O’Neill marries young writer and widow World War I ends. U.S. casualties Agnes Boulton, his second wife. number above 350,000, yet total less than one percent of the global casualties during The Provincetown Players find a permanent the war. home in Greenwich Village and produce O’Neill’s The Rope, Where the Cross is Willa Cather publishes My Antonia. Made and The Moon of the Caribbees.

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