After Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper asked Tennessee Williams why he was always "plunging into sewers," he set out to prove her wrong with A Period of Adjustment. But you don't have to plunge too far below the surface of the marital comedy to find dark subtexts leading to a queasily happy ending.
It's unlikely that anyone was pressuring Eugene O'Neill to take a break from all those serious Pulitzer Prize-winning plays when he offered up Ah, Wilderness! in 1933. Any currents of O'Neill's demons can only be inferred from an after-the-fact point of view, when the characters in this coming-of-age story were darkly reimagined years later in the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night.
For theatergoers who bring these associations to ACT's inviting production of the O'Neill comedy, there may be an added bittersweet frisson in this tale of Fourth of July with the Miller family in 1906. You don't expect O'Neill to be funny �" that is, funny without mordant undertones �" but his talents in this territory are on display in ways that are variously sly, subtle, boisterous, and kind.
Whether by design or default, Ah, Wilderness! opens with the forced joviality of a dusty drawing-room comedy. But this gives way to idiosyncratic human comedy of a family distinguished by its big heart. At the center of a calamity, at least in Miller family terms, is younger son Richard, a teen destined for Yale, who has decided to become a rebel. His mother is horrified to find plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in his bedroom �" Wilde is in prison for "bigamy," avers older brother Arthur, while the grownups mumble and stare at their shoes.
In the parlor, he can yell out, "Bring back the guillotine!" with little more than rolled eyes the result, but when he sends steamy love poems to his beloved Muriel, daughter of a leading businessman, it sets off a series of comic misadventures. Banned from seeing Muriel, the unworldly Richard ends up in a saloon drinking with a prostitute. The scene is funny in ways you might expect, but it's how his parents hopelessly try to mete out a punishment for this dalliance that shows O'Neill mining the best laughs with a gentle, forgiving manner, as Richard's father uncomfortably bumbles through a facts-of-life lecture.
Anthony Fusco is delightful as Ned Miller, Richard's slow-to-ruffle father, capturing the nuances that can release the humor. The driving force of the production, though, is Thomas Stagnitta's performance as Richard, and the young actor ratchets up the energy with comically callow grandstanding, melodramatic heartbreak, and romantic swooning.
Director Casey Stangl's production, on Ralph Funicello's stylishly skeletal set, finds the right rhythms, despite a reconciliation scene between Richard and Muriel that can't stretch its charm for the length of their repetitive on-again, off-again courtship. O'Neill is not known for his brevity, but any languor is only found here.
In addition to Fusco and Stagnitta, memorable work is provided by Rachel Ticotin as Richard's nervously doting mother, Dan Hiatt as a lovable tippling uncle, Margo Hall as a fussy but shrewd aunt, Rosa Palmeri as the stronger-than-she-looks Muriel, and Caitlan Taylor as the eager prostitute.
But in this gentle world, a word like "prostitute" is never spoken, and where she works is simply called a "bed house." And when Ned questions his son, asking if his intentions toward his sweetheart are carnal, it is rendered as, "Have you been trying to have something to do with Muriel?" We know that O'Neill knew that he had written a family fantasy (with color-blind casting here adding its own spin), but since he spread out the picnic blanket so smoothly, why not join him there for a spell?
Ah, Wilderness! will run at the Geary Theater through Nov. 8. Tickets are $20-$100. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.