Under Milk Wood

UNDER MILK WOOD

A Play for Voices
By Dylan Thomas

Directed by Bob Gras

Here is Dylan Thomas’s sense of the magnificent flavor and variety of life. Moving, hilarious — a spring day in a Welsh coast town dawns with dreams and ghosts, moves through the brilliant, noisy day of the townspeople, and closes as the “rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night.”

Performansces run Octover 17-19 & 14-26

Tickets are $12



Black Box shows perform at the Creole Gallery, 1218 Turner St. in Lansing's Old Town
_____________________________________

Additional information about Dylan Thomas:

Often considered his greatest single work is Under Milk Wood, a radio play featuring the characters of Llareggub, a fictional Welsh fishing village (humorously named; note that 'Llareggub' is 'Bugger All' backwards, implying that there is absolutely nothing to do there). Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast; he was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film.

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition.

Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.

May 1953 saw the world premiere of Thomas's play Under Milk Wood, with Thomas himself playing the part of the narrator. The assistant director was one Liz Reitell—it was Reitell's task to help put the play on the stage, including finding a suitable cast. Thomas engaged in a love affair with Reitell though, to her, their initial meeting was a disappointment. The play itself was a great triumph, even though the final draft for the ending of Under Milk Wood was completed just before the actors went on stage, with the help of Reitell herself. It was because of this performance that Thomas was asked to work on the libretto of an opera for the composer, Igor Stravinsky. Thomas's health rapidly began to deteriorate as a result of excessive drinking; he was warned by his doctor to give up alcohol but carried on regardless.

On 3 November 1953, Thomas and Reitell celebrated his 39th birthday and the success of 18 Poems. On 5 November, at the White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, Thomas began to feel ill. He decided go back to his room at the Hotel Chelsea, where he later collapsed and slipped into a coma. An ambulance was called, which took him to St Vincent's Hospital. Thomas died four days later on 9 November 1953 at around 1 pm.

Recorded causes of death included pneumonia, a result of the coma, and pressure upon the brain. Emphysema was also noted, due to Thomas's smoking habit and possibly his intake of morphine. His liver, according to the pathologist, was surprisingly healthier than one would have imagined. "Chronic alcohol poisoning" was eventually ruled as the official cause of death.


His last words, according to Jack Heliker, were: "After 40 years, this is all I've done." However, various sources state that Thomas's last words were to Reitell: "Yes, I believe you," after she tried to reassure him about his sudden illness. Others say his last words were, "I love you, but I am alone," again said to Liz Reitell. A popular myth is that Thomas's last words were, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that is a record."

It has also been said that the only person to be in the room with Dylan Thomas when he died was the poet John Berryman.

According to Walford Davies, after he went into a coma he was accidentally injected with an overdose of morphine.[15]


Following his death, his body was brought back to Wales for his burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne on 25 November. One of the last people to stay at his graveside after the funeral was his mother, Florence. His wife, Caitlin, died in 1994 and was buried alongside him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas