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A review by tome15
Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O'Neill
4.0
O’Neill, Eugene. Ah, Wilderness! 1933.
When I think of Eugene O’Neill, I remember dark, Freudian plays about dysfunctional families and broken dreams. But Ah, Wilderness! is a nostalgic little romantic comedy that I was surprised to learn was the inspiration for the Andy Hardy series of teen comedies with Mickey Rooney. It is Happy Days for folks living through the Great Depression. Set on the fourth of July in 1906, it presents an idealized middle-class family in a Currier and Ives New England town. Richard is graduating from high school with revolutionary ideas from reading the scandalous works of George Bernard Shaw, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Omar Khayyam. Will his girl ever allow him to kiss her? Will he go off to Yale and become a doctor or a lawyer? Richard’s adolescent posturing is hard to take, but we put up with it because his good-humored father (played in a 1934 movie by Lionel Barrymore) treats it with condescending humor. It is as if O’Neill is forgiving himself for his foolish teenage dreams.
When I think of Eugene O’Neill, I remember dark, Freudian plays about dysfunctional families and broken dreams. But Ah, Wilderness! is a nostalgic little romantic comedy that I was surprised to learn was the inspiration for the Andy Hardy series of teen comedies with Mickey Rooney. It is Happy Days for folks living through the Great Depression. Set on the fourth of July in 1906, it presents an idealized middle-class family in a Currier and Ives New England town. Richard is graduating from high school with revolutionary ideas from reading the scandalous works of George Bernard Shaw, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Omar Khayyam. Will his girl ever allow him to kiss her? Will he go off to Yale and become a doctor or a lawyer? Richard’s adolescent posturing is hard to take, but we put up with it because his good-humored father (played in a 1934 movie by Lionel Barrymore) treats it with condescending humor. It is as if O’Neill is forgiving himself for his foolish teenage dreams.