Under Milk Wood

The Town Was Mad, one of many titles Dylan Thomas fastened to sections of his plays for voices, was to concern a pleasantly insane Welsh town in an uncomfortingly sane surrounding world; it was to a sort of lilting, reflective morality play. But by the time he finished a complete draft for the BBC, a month before his death, Thomas had abandoned both idea and plot, and what reflection there is in Under Milk Wood lies hidden in a few lines. Now it is cheery, sometimes touching, and always charming.

Listening to a capable reading of Under Milk Wood is one of those pleasing indulgences that seem luxuries when, like the Eliot House Drama seminar's production, they are suddenly offered to us out of the air. Sitting on tall stools, 11 readers manage to fill more than 70 parts, and for the most part, their many duplications are neither annoying nor indeed very noticeable. This goes particularly for Madeline Rosten and Anna Kay Moses, the only women, switch about genially from whore to henpecker. Of all the cast they help most to keep the play from dragging. "I'm fast," says Miss Rosten engagingly, as Mae Rose Cottage. "You just wait. I'll sin till I blow up." But a few moments before, she was a garrulous, gossipy Mrs. Organ Morgan, and an almost lyric Rosic Probert ("Remember her./She is forgetting./The Earth which filled her mouth/Is vanishing from her"). And Miss Moses sings Polly Garter's song with all its appropriate plaintiveness. In other words, they both know how to read, and how to read Thomas.

So, evidently, does the director (David Mills) for he has at least prevented his cast from imitating Thomas himself, and although a few extremely odd accents occasionally obscure the play's design, they can probably be explained simply as efforts at versatility. Anyway, the directing is intelligent; people speak clearly, and pick up their cues quickly. Under Milk Wood moves too fast to be dull, but an occasional weak performance spoils the pace. When the narrator, the First Voice (Ray Houchins) said "You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing," I heard only the cars on Memorial Drive; he lacks the power to demand convincingly that his audience "come closer."

But another narrative device, the blind Captain Cat (Nick Carrera) has exactly that power; Alexander Macmillan works a little simple magic with the Reverend Eli Jenkins sunrise and sunset poems; and Newell Flather as Nogood Boyo, Dai Bread, Utah Watkins, and Sinbad is consistently, wonderfully funny.

For all the inadequate moments of the production, Under Milk Wood remains a little luxury, a refreshing bit of insanity in the far too ordered time of Reading Period. One thing I don't understand is why so much of the cast looked bored with it; I wasn't.