At the Foot of Llareggub

What with the techniques of modern stage design and the cooperation of art and drama in contemporary theater, many plays are better seen than heard. But bearing the subtitle. A Play for Voices. Dylan Thomas's last play. Under Milk Wood, reflects the importance of the work's auditory aspects. Thomas originally intended Under Milk Wood for radio broadcast, writing the play for that medium at a time when he was attempting to turn from his primarily personal style of poetry to a more public form of expression. Although this transition did not apparently provide Thomas with the necessary artistic or existential answers (he died of drink several months after he completed the play), his own inner suffering fails to surface in this tender and humorous description of a small Welsh town.

The extremely lyrical and musical qualities of Thomas's language transform the simple depiction of this "back water of life" into a lilting modern folk ballad, and it is plain to see that young Bob Zimmerman knew what he was doing when he changed his name to Bob Dylan. Influenced as he was by this evocative heritage, the revival of Thomas's dramatic scheme can still ring true for the present generation. Often more lyric verse than drama, a performance of Under Milk Wood tickles the fancy and intoxicates the cars with continual pranks on the English language and hilarious word imagery.

Two narrators introduce the audience into the town as it lies sleeping just before dawn. Reading their passages from two almost invisible black books, the narrators (Ann Fay and Kim Fadiman) appear to be gazing down on the village itself, as they involve their listeners by addressing them with the repeated invitation, "only you can see..." The other narrator, the blind Captain Cat (Peter Wirth), was, for Thomas, the natural bridge between the eyes and the ears of his radio listeners, but Wirth's grizzled dignity lends an especially sympathetic dimension to the part.

Captain Cat lives in a dual world of actual sounds and nostalgic dreams. As he follows Willy Nilly, the Postman (Paul Eisenberg) down the street with his ears, he experiences the life of the village and its inhabitants through his sense of small and sound. The colorful cast of characters often leaves the immediate sensory present, however, intermittently to revisit the past: for Thomas, although professing to paint merely one tantalizing and cyclical day in the life of the village, pulls his audience from one today to many yesterday through his narrators' reiterated incantation that "time passes."

It passes from hour to hour, vignette to vignette, and character to character, but also beckons the Captain back to a dreamland inhabited by Rosie Probert, the love of his younger years. For Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard (Joanne Ray), the past lives on in the ghosts of her two late husbands, who are forced to share the hellish hygiene of their window's house and her emasculating bed. Polly Garter (Debi Neipris), the generous town whore and loving mother of countless bastards, mourns a deal lover in songs of piercing beauty, while ironically scrubbing the floor of the Welfare Hall for the Mothers' Union Social Dance. And adeptly jumping the generations to become the community's beloved grandmother. Neipris merrily counts each new day of her 86-year-old life this "heaven on earth." where both old men and babies are rolled out in prams to soak up the springtime sun.

Thomas, on the other hand, fosters no such illusions as paradise. His descriptions are instead realistic (though affectionate), as he choreographs his way through the gossip and gallivanting, the sexual inhibitions and in discretions, the romance and rigidity of his characters' numerous lives. Their number and range of personality challenge any company of actors, large or small. But Chris Conte's cast of ten perform their theatrical take diligently and well. Conte's method of letting his actors play two or more characters in succession is intriguing, and enhances the cast's various abilities, rather than obscuring them. The interplay of voices and character changes keeps the physically static play in motion, even when the stage rests in the total darkness of night.

"We are not wholly bad or good / Who live our lives under Milk Wood, / And Thou, I know, wilt be the first / To see our best side not our worst," prays the Reverend Jenkins (Henry Goodhue) at his evening devotions. Although it is not always the role of the playwright to play God, Dylan Thomas heeded this prayer in good stead, and although it is even less the right of an audience, Chris Conte induces his to do the