Milk Wood's No Milk Toast

It would be comfortable to describe Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood as a Welsh Our Town, but it isn’t. There are some parallels, of course: the lovesick young people, the town gossips, the all-knowing ghosts. But Thomas’ town is not Grover’s Corners. It’s the seaside village of Llareggub (read backwards.) Its 500 inhabitants are all determined eccentrics, and some of them detest each other. Porchlight Theatre, in association with Upon These Boards, has presented Under Milk Wood as its seventh outdoor summer production.

We first meet these characters in the dead of a spring night, “starless and Bible-black . . . all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.” But they are dreaming, and we can hear their dreams. Capt. Cat, the blind old sea captain, revisits his drowned shipmates and his long-dead sweetheart, Rosie, who, incidentally, was also everybody else’s sweetheart. Miss Price dreams of her true love, a draper, who proclaims his intent to “warm the sheets like an electric toaster,” while Mr. Waldorf, the rabbit catcher, worries whom he will take to be his “awful wedded wife.”

When the sun comes up, we meet two citizens who love and praise their town, the semi-dotty Rev. Eli Jenkins and Mary Ann Sailors, 85 years old, who appears at her window and rejoices. But we also encounter Polly Garter, whose garden grows nothing but laundry and babies, and Mrs. Willy Nilly, whose kettle is on the boil, “ready to steam open the mail.” Blind Capt. Cat hears them all, the “babies and old men put out in their broken prams” and “the children shrilled off to school.” As the day progresses, Under Milk Wood introduces 16 actors playing 30 townsfolk with such inventive names as Organ Morgan, Mrs. Dai Bread One, Mae Rose Cottage, NoGood Boyo and Lord Cutglass. The ensemble also portrays an assortment of fishermen, chickens, horses and nanny goats. Milk Wood, we are told, means different things to the townsfolk, but we are never told what that is. Thomas’ imaginary Welsh community has no central theme.

When he wrote this work, the author intended it as a radio play for voices. He was already a recognized poet in Wales then, having started to publish when he was only 19. Once he’d married Caitlin and produced a son, Thomas found that broadcasting paid better than poetry, and the young poet went to work for the BBC. He continued to work on Under Milk Wood through the 1940’s, however, and it was performed as a play in New York,1953. The playwright took the parts of The Voice and the Rev. Eli Jenkins. By then, Thomas’ reputation as a debtor, drunkard, brawler and womanizer had established him as a visiting character and had also demolished his health. On his third tour to the U.S., he collapsed and died. He was only 39 years old, and his entire estate was valued at around 100 pounds.

Porchlight’s production has assembled a colossal cast of experienced performers, the youngest of whom (Sam Congdon of Mill Valley) is only 17 and just out of Tam High. The Voice this time is richly female, and it belongs to actress Megan Cole, who also appears as Rosie Probert and Organ Morgan, while The Rev. Eli Jenkins as well as Butcher Beynon are played by Wm. Todd Tressler. The dueling Pughs are Craig Neibaur and Kate Brickley; Dodds Delzell and Janice G. Erlendson are Mr. and Mrs. Willy Nilly. Audiences will also recognize Ron Severdia, Joel Rainwater, Stephanie Hunt, Marjorie Rose Taylor and Erica Smith. The cast is further enhanced by Martha Stookey, Amaya Alonso-Hallifax, Howard Dillon and David Lovine.

The play’s Director, Randall Stuart of Oregon, stirs this large cast all around a multi-level stage in Porchlight’s redwood-ringed amphitheatre and rounds out the voices with original music by Katy Stephan. It’s an antic production with Dylan Thomas’ sarcastic bite -- a wholly different take on summer theatre.

Under Milk Wood will be at the Redwood Amphitheatre in the Marin art & Garden Center through July 12, Thursdays through Sundays, at 7:30p.m.with a special performance July 7. (No show July 4.) Advance tickets are $15; at the door, $20. To order, call 251-1027.