Tom Harney, left, plays Richard Miller, a young man coming of age in Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness!" with Denise Cormier and David Breitbarth as his parents. JOHN REVISKY PHOTO/ASOLO REP
Playing a young man trying to figure out where to focus his hopes and dreams, Tom Harney is realizing quite a few of his own.
The third-year student in the FSU/Asolo Conservatory has the leading role in Eugene O’Neill’s rarely-seen comedy “Ah, Wilderness!” which opens Friday at Asolo Repertory Theatre.
“It’s quite the honor and it’s quite the undertaking, but it’s everything that I could have asked for,” said Harney, looking youthful with a trim haircut. “Everyone hopes when they get to the third year in this program to get a role that they can dive into head first and completely lose themselves in, and it’s been a dream come true for me.”
Harney plays the free-spirited 17-year-old Richard Miller, who is growing up before our eyes on July 4, 1906, when he starts to stand up for himself and figure out what he wants to do with his life.
“Richard is a lot like life,” Harney said. “He is himself a contradiction, trying to find out who he is on his own, but also trying to find his balance of trying to respect his parents and be a good citizen of that time. He’s a really smart kid, a sort of genius. He reads all this material that almost no one ever reads, except his dad, and his dad hasn’t even read some of the things Richard’s reading now. In a sense, he’s ahead of his time with radical ideas that he doesn’t know what to do with and that gets him in all sorts of trouble.”
Tom Harney, a third-year student in the FSU/Asolo Conservatory, has the leading role of Richard Miller in Eugene O'Neill's comedy "Ah, Wilderness!" at Asolo Repertory Theatre. JOHN REVISKY PHOTO/ASOLO REP
Harney describes it as honest trouble. “He’s not trying to hurt anyone. He’s trying to live life and now he’s discovering how to live it.”
Director Greg Leaming, who also runs the FSU/Asolo Conservatory, said Richard “goes through everything that everyone has gone through at every part of their lives. The first time having sex, the first time discovering politics, discovering alcohol, discovering the soap box. He’s finding out what it means to discover something for the very first time and thinking you’re the first to ever discover it.”
That comment prompts a memory from Harney about one of his close friends who went to grad school and felt like he had discovered Seattle the way no one else had.
“That’s Richard,” Harney said. “He finds something and this is like he wrote it and no one else has found it.”
Leaming is staging the first production of “Ah, Wilderness!” at Asolo Rep since 1979, and the first O’Neill play in 30 years.
He said the play may not get produced as often as O’Neill’s big dramas because it’s not what audiences expect from the playwright who won four Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize during his career.
“In one sense, it’s extremely romantic and extremely optimistic and in the best sense it’s very middle class. It’s not about the dregs that O’Neill was so fond of. I think it’s just unexpected for O’Neill,” he said.
Peggy Roeder, who plays Richard’s spinster Aunt Lily, describes it as a “quiet play. It doesn’t have the explosive drama that you get in ‘Long Day’s Journey (into Night)’ or ‘Moon for the Misbegotten. People have come to expect that with O’Neill.”
But that’s what makes audiences fall for it, she said. “It touches them because it is your son going through this or your brother-in-law” in the slice of life that O’Neill depicts on a day when “everything changes for Richard, even if it doesn’t change the world.”
Lilianna Solum and Tom Harney in Asolo Rep's production of "Ah, Wilderness!" Photo by John Revisky.
While O’Neill’s best-known works represent autobiographical memories, Leaming said that “Ah, Wilderness!” is more like the childhood the playwright wishes he had, or that anyone would want to have.
The original production starred composer George M. Cohan as Richard’s father, Nat Miller, a role later taken over by humorist Will Rogers.
Leaming’s production features longtime Asolo Rep company member David Breitbarth as Nat, with Denise Cormier as his wife, Essie, and Douglas Jones as the drunken Uncle Sid.
O’Neill becomes the first of the three dominant American dramatists of the 20th century (including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams) to make it into Asolo Rep’s five-year exploration of the American Character.
Producing artistic director Michael Donald Edwards said, in a statement, that the project, now in its fourth season, wouldn’t be complete without O’Neill. “This play presents an idyllic version of America that implies its promise and Richard Miller represents every young person who is struggling to find a voice. if there is one person responsible for creating what we understand American theater to be, it is Eugene O’Neill,” he said.
Leaming said O’Neill is “writing the romantic vision of the American character in its infancy. It’s before World War I, before the country grew up and in that portrait of America, the child is the father of the man. We see the roots of everything we’ve become. We see the roots in the simplest of ways, the family, romance in middle class America. They’re not big stories, but America isn’t made of up of big stories, it’s made up of small people pursuing small lives and uncovering universal truths.”
THEATER PREVIEW
"AH, WILDERNESS!"
Previews Wednesday-Thursday, opens Friday and continues through April 10 at Asolo Repertory Theatre in the FSU Center for the Performing Arts, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Inside Asolo Rep talk about the play and “Living on Love” at 11 a.m. Jan. 27. A meet-the-actors reception will be held after the Jan. 24 matinee. Out@Asolo Rep performance is March 16. Tickets start at $24. For more information: 941-351-8000; asolorep.org
