UNDER MILK WOOD
The Porchlight Theatre Company is currently performing UNDER MILK WOOD: a poetic, lyrical play, by Dylan Thomas.
Aside from his imploring poem DO NOT GO SOFTLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, Dylan Thomas is known mostly for two things: his name being usurped or misappropriated by Robert Zimmerman a.k.a. Bob Dylan, and his most important opus: UNDER MILK WOOD.
This play is similar both in spirit and structure to OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder.
The personality of a town, is examined via its irreducible elements: it is divided along Freudian lines: there is the conscious world of daily activity which narrated by the First Voice, and the subconscious world of intimate thoughts, dreams and feelings revealed by the Second Voice.
Historically, two Welsh villages have vied for recognition—and the ensuing tourist traffic, pounds and euros—as the setting for UNDER MILK WOOD: one is New Quay on Cardigan Bay, and the other is Laugharne: a village where Dylan Thomas lived on and off during the 1930s.
Contentious, pompous, tweedy English Professors and pretentious, affected Literature Teachers are forced to agree, that the denizens of Laugharne served as the inspiration for the people of the fictitious Llareggub while the town of New Quay served as the topographical model for Llareggub.
The tourist board of New Quay however may have the upper hand: it must be vouchsafed that Dylan was staying in New Quay—a fishing village and a seaside resort—when he commenced writing the play, in earnest, in 1944.
Yet purists might argue that the roots of the play hearken back to 1935 and a surrealist story—THE ORCHARD—in which Dylan first begins developing characters that he would ultimately transplant in his fantasy town of Llareggub.
As Hemingway used to say, "Anyone can write; the real craft is in the rewriting."
Dylan Thomas rewrote poems dozens, indeed hundreds, of times.
It was in this revision process that Dylan found a freer form for this play.
Using his "freer form" he began what would prove to be his final rework of MILK WOOD in Laugharne in 1949: four years before his untimely death.
His intention was to produce "a piece, a play, an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness, of the town (he) lived in, and to write it simply and warmly and comically with lots of movement and varieties of moods, so that, at many levels, you come to know the town as an inhabitant of it."
What Dylan achieved was an "orchestration of voices, sights and sounds that conjure up the dreams and waking hours of an imagined Welsh seaside village."
The play chronicles the cycle of one day; in doing so, it "balances a rhythmic, densely poetic language with a nuanced ear for the musical cadences of speech."
Like a Thomas Hardy novel, Thomas Grey's ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCH YARD or Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, Dylan Thomas writes to celebrate the common life.
His play is an affirmation: a redemptive piece: it "carries a moral dimension, an imaginative, lyrical empathy for the regenerative innocence of the average human being and his or her capacity for grace."
Eccentricity is not only tolerated in Llareggub, it is celebrated as the highest expression or the organic manifestation of celestial creativity; "sin is forgiven . . . love is nurtured - or at least dreamt about and possible."
Like the Buddha, Thomas feels a compassion for the small dramas of the mundane: it is his belief that the commonplace and the quotidian unite all of us as people.
After performing UNDER MILK WOOD, the greatest stage and screen legend to have haled forth from Wales, Richard Burton, declared that "the entire thing is about religion, the idea of death and sex."
Thomas embraces the urgent themes of Freud: there are powerful, often sexual, forces operating beneath the calm exterior of Llareggub: the town has "fallen head over bells in love".
For example: Gossamer Beynon feels Sinbad the Sailor's "goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world."
The schizoid MR Pugh imagines concocting "a fricassee of deadly nightshade" to poison his unsuspecting wife.
The blind Captain Cat is haunted by unfading visions of Rosie Probert: "the one love of his sea-life" and the mercenary comforts she once provided him.
The town balances its contradictions: it is sensitive, rustic, often comic, magical, pagan and holy despite its faults: it is a "mystic tumulus."
The initial verses that Thomas wrote for the play sprang into his mind one winter morning when he went out early and stroled the still sleeping town of New Quay: as he walked, verses—about the inhabitants—composed themselves spontaneously in his mind.
Given the grandeur of the play, one wonders if a minor North Bay theater company might be too steeped in its own artistic arrogance were it to even attempt it.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Porchlight Players prove themselves more than up to the task.
Megan Cole, as "the voice" or narrator, unfurls this plush verbal tapestry with clarity, rhythm and a measured cadance that brings every detail of Llareggub into high-definition, techni-color, stereo-phonic focus.
Erica Smith—as Polly Garter and MRS Organ Morgan—is a fine actress, with a beautiful singing voice; given the few opportunities that the script provides her to showcase her vocals, the audience is only tantalized by the superb quality of her singing; hopefully the Bay Area will hear more of her music.
Marjorie Rose Taylor—as Mae Rose Cottage and Lily Smalls—possesses some unique qualities as a young actress: she has a marvelous—and did we say, daring—capacity to achieve a highly revealing transparency on stage; she becomes a lens through which the audience can violate her character's privacy to spy on her intimate coquettish fantasy life.
As Mae Rose she entertains scintillating dreams of meeting the right man by being a whimsical and capricious rebel: perhaps too a naughty rebel; as Lily Smalls—the Maid serving the Beynons'—she wistfully dreams of ardent love and a luscious, romantic life: her swoons within escape like whispers ushered into the night air.
Anyone who has been raked over the coals in divorce court, watched a pre-nuptial agreement go up in smoke, paid spouse support or alimony, or has reluctantly acquiesced to a property settlement, will certainly be entertained by Craig Neibaur performing MR Pugh: the local school master, who perpetually dreams of creatively murdering his wife via an assortment of resourceful, deadly, off-the-shelf, do-it-yourself apothecaries.
If you ever thought that UNDER MILK WOOD was too high-brow for the likes of you, you were probably right; but go anyway: no one will be asking for proof of your erudition and this play will absolutely entertain you even if your usual fare is SEX IN THE CITY, FRIENDS or the Bass Fishing Channel.
For tickets visit www.porchlight.net or call 415-251-1027.
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