Under Mills Wood

Though written for radio, Under Milk Wood surely deserves live public performance; yet, I would have thought it obvious that "a play for voices" is meant to be heard and not seen. Well, if it wasn't earlier this week, it should be now. By adding physical movement to his Dunster-East House production, director Walter Licht has only distracted from the poetry of Dylan Thomas's prose. His player's go through superfluous panto-mines of their words, freeze in awkward tableaux, and speak an appalling number of lines from halfway up the aisle.

If not staging Under Milk Wood as a simple reading was one mistake, staging it as a farce was another. The play leaves an acrid taste behind unless the inhabitants of Llareggub, Thomas's imaginary Welsh backwater, retain their basic dignity. We follow them through a typical spring day -- eavesdropping as they dream, work, gossip, wish, torment one another, and frolic in the hay -- and almost everyone is bizarre and funny. But the purpose of the tour is to change our minds, to make us see the human beings behind the aberrations. If our feelings don't change and deepen, if automatic laughter doesn't yield to compassion, then Under Milk Wood is just a freak show.

That's too harsh a team for the Dunster production; but Licht has allowed many members of his large cast to turn their characters into caricatures. Mr. Pugh, the hen-pecked husband endlessly dreaming of poisoning his wife; Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, who won't let boarders into her boarding house because they might breathe on the chairs -- exaggerated performances kept these and other figures forever outside the realm of credibility. Even an accomplished actress like Ellery Akers shrieked, slouched, and grimaced her way through the evening.

Some performers resisted the temptation to mug and punch their lines home for easy laughs. Roger Dunwell, as the principal narrator (a role Thomas took when the play premiered in New York) both understood his part and spoke it clearly; if he has conquered opening-night nervousness, his reading ought to set a standard for the rest of the cast. Patrick Diehl, a splendid basso, made the lusting quack, Mr. Waldo, seem a lovable rogue. And Mary Moss, playing a variety of loose women, could hardly have been improved upon (her singing was off-key, but there again, one suspects nerves). Her question -- "Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?"--gave me chills.

Also deserving of praise are Mario Mitchell (a girl), who played a brace of coy maidens without cloying; Rick Ashton, a minor player with a fine sense of timing; and Sandra Robertson, whose self-control kept several scenes from running off the track. For completeness' sake I suppose I ought to add that two or three of the remaining actors were awful.