Casting Announced for Ah, Wilderness! at Arena Stage

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater announces casting for Eugene O'Neill's singular comedy Ah, Wilderness! Helen Hayes Award winner and former Arena Stage Associate Artistic Director Kyle Donnelly returns to direct her 21st show at Arena Stage. Ah, Wilderness! runs March 9-April 8, 2012 in the Fichandler Stage as part of the two-month Eugene O'Neill Festival.

Helen Hayes Award winners and local favorites Rick Foucheux (last seen at Arena Stage in Theater J's The Chosen) and Nancy Robinette (Arena Stage's You, Nero) last appeared together at Arena Stage as heads of the house in Death of a Salesman and now return to star as parents Nat and Essie Miller. Joining them are Jonathan Lincoln Fried (Arena Stage's A Time to Kill, New York's Signature Theatre's Landscape of the Body) as Essie's brother Sid Davis, Kimberly Schraf (Theater J's After the Fall) as Nat's sister Lily Miller, and Leo Erickson (Studio Theatre's The Habit of Art) as David McComber/Salesman. Returning on the heels of her acclaimed professional debut as Ado Annie in Arena Stage's Oklahoma! is the Madeira School senior June Schreiner as Richard's sweetheart Muriel McComber.

Making their Arena Stage debuts as the Miller siblings are Davis Chandler Hasty (Round House Theatre's A Wrinkle in Time) as older brother Arthur, William Patrick Riley (La Jolla Playhouse's Hoover Comes Alive!) as middle son Richard, and Talisa Friedman (Studio Theatre's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) as daughter Mildred. Ten-year-old Thomas Langston plays youngest brother Tommy and is understudied by real-life brother T.J. Langston (both performed in Everyman Theatre's All My Sons).

Rounding out the cast are James Flanagan (Theater J's The Moscows of Nantucket) as Wint Selby/Bartender, Pearl Rhein (Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Cowgirls) as Belle, and Allison Leigh Corke (Georgia Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) as the family's Irish maid Norah.

Return to an idyllic age of Americana in Eugene O'Neill's unabashedly romantic and sweetly funny Ah, Wilderness! As the Connecticut-based Miller clan plans their traditional Fourth of July festivities, their dreamy-eyed middle child Richard is wrestling with cultural conventions, political uncertainty, the power of literature, and the exquisite pain of love. The memories of family life were never so delicately portrayed as in O'Neill's only comedy, his coming-of-age love letter to a simpler time, which finds the master playwright "at his most wistful and serene" (New York Times).