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Williamstown nails Under Milk Wood
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Under Milk Wood
By Dylan Thomas. Directed by Darko Tresnjak. Set by Alexander Dodge. Costumes by Linda Cho. Lighting by Rui Rita. With Dana Ivey, D.B. Sweeney, Jarlath Conroy, Jay Goede, Kathy McCafferty, Jack Willis, Kristine Nielsen, Susan Blommaert, Charles Janasz, Dylan Baker, Becky Ann Baker, Kenneth Garner, Stephen Gabis, and Rachel A. Siegel. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, through August 3.
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Except for his villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," the Welsh lyric poet Dylan Thomas isn’t read much any more. But his A Child’s Christmas in Wales used to be a perennial, and when I was in high school, I thrilled to the sprung rhythms of "Fern Hill" and marveled at the way the poet shifted tones, in his trademark way. Thomas was a raucous, besotted life embracer who always located the bitter taste of death inside the bite of the sumptuous summer apple. His untimely death — at 39, he drank himself into a coma in a Manhattan bar — seemed wretchedly apt for a man who wrote as he did. Under Milk Wood was his last work. He called it "a play for voices," and it has been performed on the radio. But it was written for a live audience, and Thomas himself directed and appeared in the first reading, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, six months before he died. (Caedmon released a recording of this historic event that is still available.) Very seldom has a fully mounted production been attempted, since Thomas’s cast of characters encompasses all the inhabitants of the small Welsh town of Llareggub ("bugger all" spelt backward), from sundown to sundown. The reading he supervised got away with half a dozen actors, but a completely imagined Under Milk Wood demands dozens. Forty-one bodies (including 10 children) cross the stage of the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Darko Tresnjak’s enchanting revival, playing 73 parts. Not least among Tresnjak’s achievements is the flawlessness of the ensemble, which includes such Williamstown stalwarts as Kristine Nielsen, Dylan Baker, Becky Ann Baker, Kathy McCafferty, and Susan Blommaert. They share the space with Alexander Dodge’s inventive set, which is like a live-action Advent calendar designed by Chagall. It had been years since I’d looked at or listened to the play, and what I’d remembered was the elegiac tone and the faraway, fairy-tale language, as well as the work’s dramatic link to Our Town and its literary link to Ulysses — two more celebrated attempts at a cross-section of the life of a community. Tresnjak sets a bedtime-story mood by placing one of the two Readers (Dana Ivey) in a cozy rocking chair downstage left. But the other Reader (D.B. Sweeney) sits on a barstool at Llareggub’s pub, the Sailors Arms, swigging beer at the other side of the stage. (In their different styles, both performers do full justice to Thomas’s text.) So Tresnjak suggests another sort of tall tale at the same time, and it took about 20 minutes for me to adjust to the style of the production, which, spinning off the notion of a tavern yarn, is broadly comic for the first half. The funniest of the caricaturists are lanky, mooning Jay Goede as Mog Edwards, the shopkeeper who longs for the arms of Miss Myfanway Price (McCafferty); Jack Willis as Butcher Beynon, who revels in the bloodthirstiness of his trade; Nielsen as Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, who rules the ghosts of her two husbands with an iron fist; Charles Janasz as Mr. Pugh, who dreams of poisoning his insufferable frau (Blommaert); and especially Dylan Baker as Cherry Owen, sober all day and drunk all night. Cherry’s reply when barkeep Sinbad Sailors (Gus Danowski) asks him what he’ll have is an ecstatic, wide-eyed "Too much!"; Baker’s reading of these two words brings down the house. The tone changes when free-spirited Polly Garter (Rachel A. Siegel), who sleeps with many men and raises their babies without complaint, sings mournfully about the only lover she’s ever cared for — "Little Willie Wee, who is dead, dead, dead." As Llareggub’s bustling day sinks into evening, the dead take up almost as much dramatic focus as the living, and it seems clear that the protagonist of the piece is blind Captain Cat (Janrath Conroy), who dreams of Rosie Probert (Siegel), the whore he adored. She returns to him from her grave, rising on a rose-garlanded swing, and if you’re a Thomas fan, you think of "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" and the indelible final line of "Fern Hill": "Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
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