"a loving tribute...has much to please and amaze"

July 25, 2003 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall (about Ms. Hall)

Under Milk Wood, the only play that Dylan Thomas wrote for the stage, although it was never staged in his life-time, is being given a bawdy and at times beautiful production at Williamstown Festival Theatre under Darko Tresnjak's sensitive and creative direction.

Although the play was given a full theatrical presentation a few months after Thomas' death in 1953, it has been rarely revived. The current production in the Berkshires is thus a golden opportunity.

For many Thomas fans, the play has existed for fifty years in the long-playing recording of a chance-made tape of the play's first reading at the YMHA in New York where, on a bare stage, Thomas and five actors read all the roles.

(Editor's note: That recording, and all the other's made by Dylan Thomas have been collected on CD, available at amazon.com: Dylan Thomas CD (Unabridged): The Caedmon Collection [UNABRIDGED]

Comparisons are inevitable. Devotees of the recording will miss Thomas' sea-swirling voice as narrator. However, this production has wisely avoided imitating that voice. Two narrators, D. B. Sweeney and Dana Ivey, stationed at the proscenium frame, divide the narrative, dynamically and clearly, providing a frame for the action and occasionally moving up into it.

The magnificent setting, designed by Alexander Dodge and lit by Rui Rita, takes full advantage of the circular pattern of the script itself which begins in darkness with the little sea-side Welsh village asleep, circles through a day, and ends again in darkness.

The backdrop is an inverted circle, scooping to a center, of houses and trees that stand stark and coal-black around the town. And on the stage floor a circular green hill slopes up to the summit where blind Captain Cat's boat rests. The site serves as a focal point from which he, serving as an almost third narrator can, listening, "see" the events of the town. As his green hilltop slowly revolves, different angles can drift into view.

But Captain Cat (Jarlath Conroy) and his location are more than dramatically useful, for he and his "dead dears," the ghostly dead who visit his dreams, open the action of the play and close it in another circle of this circular play.

And while the play is hilarious, irreverent, full of wickedly clever language and boisterously scandalous doings, when in his final frame at nightfall, Captain Cat "sees" Rosie Probert (Rachel Siegel) swinging high above the town on a rope of roses and begs her to "lie down, lie easy, let me shipwreck in your thighs," he is begged to "remember her/she is forgetting" as she slowly goes down into the darkness.

And a child voice says, "Look, Captain Cat is crying." Making this play, as it circles to its closing, so moving that we too can be moved to tears, as the citizens of the little town, the hen-pecked, the over-bearing, the drunken, the lecherous, the promiscuous, the innocent and the guilty, sink into the star-studded night.

An able cast of forty weaves in and out of the patterns of life in the little town. The most engaging of them, and the ones in scenes that probably both recording advocates and "let's see it" advocates will enjoy are often the wickedly funny ones

There is the mild-mannered but plotting Mr. Pugh (Charles Janasz) studying his books on how to do-in his over-bearing wife (Susan Bloommaert) who witheringly asks him, "What's that book by your trough, Mr. Pugh?" And as he mildly says that it's a book about the saints, to see Mrs. Pugh consumed in a stunning lighting effect.

The lecherous Mr. Waldo (Jack Willis who also turns in a wickedly funny character of the town butcher) is marvelously evoked in his dreams by four versions of himself simultaneously on stage, all dressed alike and letting us know from age four onwards he has been quite a fellow.

The lusty married couple Cherry Owens and his wife (Dylan Baker and Becky Ann Baker) rejoice in their riotous couplings.

Jay Goede doubles as effete Mog Edwards wooing Miss Myfawny Price (Kathy McCaffrey) by letter from his shop at one end of the town to hers at the other end though never the twain shall meet. Goede also appears as one of the two dead-but-still-hen-pecked husbands of Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard (Kristing Nielson). The reappearance of the two dutiful dead are well-staged, as portraits as well as the risen.

These fully and imaginatively staged scenes work well. They are interwoven with crowd scenes that give us a feel of the to-and-fro goings of the town's citizens, some working better than others. Lord Cut Glass's sixty ticking clocks arrive in a fine stage effect. And now and then aged but buoyant Mary Ann Sailors (Phillis Somerville) will pop out to thank God for porridge.

For many Thomas fans, Polly Garter, (Rachel A Siegel)whose open arms and womanly charms have been sought by many of the town's men, and whose house is full of babies, is one of the most poignant characters in the play. She may be shunned by the town's women, we see her scrubbing town floors, but we care for her deeply as she sings, "But I always think as we tumble into bed/Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.." Her voice trails off and author Thomas in his script indicates: 'A silence.' It works.

Another pattern that works is the weaving through the day and the town the figure of Reverend Eli Jenkins (Stephen Gabis), a character of faith and optimism and a role that Thomas played in the recording with such feeling that the other actors suggested he step forward and deliver Jenkins' lines, which he did - the only movement in that staged reading.

In this staging, his benign appearance weaving through the outrageous doings of many of the characters is an important look into the poet whose own behavior was usually outrageous but who could write the poem "Do not go gentle into that good night." (hear it read by Dylan Thomas).

Dylan Thomas may not be as hero-worshipped by the young as he was back in the 1950's when many of them carried his collected poems in their hip pockets, but he is still a viable and important poet of the 20th century.

Whatever your orientation to Thomas's works, the play now on the Williamstown stage is a loving tribute to a worthy talent. Whether you have loved his poetry for years, or never experienced any of it, this play has much to please and amaze. The actors obviously enjoy it, and you will too.