play and concert review

When I visited the Eugene O'Neill home in Danville last May, I noted that every fall a local theatrical group does an O'Neill Play Festival: usually just one of O'Neill's longer plays for a run of a couple of weeks. And this year the main play was to be Ah, Wilderness! known as his only comedy. Would I be willing to give that a try, after having had enough for a lifetime of intense and garrulous O'Neill tragedy?

Well, I wouldn't make the drive just for that, but since a matinee performance coincided with an evening on my subscription for the California Symphony in Walnut Creek nearby, I went ahead.

Ah, Wilderness! takes place in 1906 and was written in 1933; this production was staged as a radio reading from the '30s, with the actors supposedly standing in the broadcast studio. This simplified staging a lot.

Unfortunately I had slept poorly and nodded off enough during the play that I didn't always follow the action. But I followed enough that it was clear that, while the characters behaved like O'Neill characters, they weren't as annoying as other O'Neill characters, and the dialogue was passingly amusing. The acting throughout was strong and clear.

As for the concert, the gimmick was that all three works were written for performance in the U.S., though only one of the composers is American. Sibelius's The Oceanides, inspired by Greek mythology instead of his usual Finnish, doesn't sound like most Sibelius but depicts the rising and falling of an ocean surge pretty well. There followed an equally dynamic run through Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, more energetic than it was exciting, but still crisply produced. And, for a new piece, Jennifer Higdon's Cello Concerto, which its dedicatee Julian Schwarz has been taking around to various orchestras. Higdon has mastered the trick of ensuring that the solo cello is never drowned out by the orchestra; generally it's a meanderingly lyrical work without much particularly to note it by.