The Theater: New Stage Work

Under Milk Wood (by Dylan Thomas) has progressed from a radio show to a stage reading to a full-fledged theater piece. Except that the theater piece does not represent progress. A poet who is a magician, if also a wastrel, with words has been contorted into a playwright whose figures are made to skitter and bray and strike deliberate ham attitudes. As staged by Douglas Cleverdon. Dylan Thomas’s picture of a Welsh community, at once full of local flavor and universal types, has pretty much become a variety show. Atmosphere, which should plainly come first, now plays second fiddle to antics.

If Thomas, during his last years, was on the way to turning playwright, he had not yet learned in Under Milk Wood that an overplus of words is dangerous in the theater, that many small verbal victories can spell theatrical defeat. But it is extremely doubtful that in Under Milk Wood Thomas intended to be primarily a playwright; as a radio or reading piece, Milk Wood was meant to be heard and not seen. It uses words as incantation, as portrait or landscape or genre painting, for a caught moment or an animated cartoon. Unlike Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, it lacks even allegorical plot progression or a central group of characters. Not its world but its words are dynamic.

Moreover, Director Cleverdon has sought to give it visual stage life not as a kind of ballet but as a type of vaudeville. Yet the more vigorously Under Milk Wood is acted, the clearer it becomes that −despite lively moments−there is no real action. More dubiously still, the acting is self-consciously lowbrow, a mock ten-twent-thirt suggesting the beer-and-pretzel revivals of old melodramas in the 1930s. But in a work where the rich, lush language is itself almost too much of a good thing, such shenanigans first of all prove excessive, and secondly, ill-mated, like pretzels and wine. Under Milk Wood has still its sudden rushes of light, its lunges of fun, its elegiac, sea-washed moods. But the production, in trying to double its appeal, has come much closer to halving it.