Theater Review: A Child’s Christmas in Wales at the Gamm Theatre
Monday, December 13, 2010
Casting literary works onto the stage is risky business. How to take a story that was created to be read as narrative, not shown as dramatic action, and fully inhabit the space that theater demands?
It's hard enough with novels replete with scene-setting, and one might consider that the Public Theater, helmed by Trinity's former artistic director Oskar Eustis, presented The Great Gatsby this fall, but as GATZ, a full-length reading, inventively dramatized, of the complete narrative (six-and-a-half hours). This sold-out critical sensation took Fitzgerald at his words - all 47,000 of them - and had the courage to set that on the stage. It was bold, inventive, and paid off.
And so what to do with A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas's so-well-known prose poem that lives, it seems, in the baritone of a narrator? Even the snippets of dialogue among the characters plucked from the deep Welsh snows of the poet's reminiscence, seem more like spindrift off a snowbank than characters themselves.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe Gamm's challenge
A challenge indeed, for the Gamm Theatre's artistic director Tony Estrella, who has taken the work and recast it this season set for theater by not only dramatizing episodes from the poem, but adding snippets of Thomas's other writings to create a setting for the tale.
In other words, we meet a drunken Thomas (played with lumbering brio by Tom Gleadow), stumbling home from a Christmas Eve to his small room at the Chelsea Hotel. He introduces himself to us and tells us he's poetic, Welsh, and a hell of a drinker.
All this exposition rattles at the top, as these things often do. You can hear the gears grind between Estrella's writing and the set pieces he's curated for giving us the Thomas who will inhabit the youth of the title piece. The loveliest moment, in fact, is not Thomas's writing at all, but a Christmas carol that passersby sing outside the hotel window. When Thomas asks them to sing it in Welsh, they do. Gleadow's swoon at the sound is lovely stuff indeed. As is the song itself.
But grind we must until the inventive set makes Thomas's Murphy bed fold up into the wall and reveal the holiday mantel of a more distant household, and finally, the wonderful opening lines of the poem are heard:
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
In a romanticized Wales
From here, we are solidly in a romanticized Wales on Christmas Eve and Day, and Thomas's memories of rascally children throwing snowballs at cats, ringing doorbells, and delighting in the antics of drowsy uncles, drunken aunts, and one of literarature's best litanies: the list of "useless presents."
Estrella passes the narrative back and forth between Gleadow's childlike Thomas in his own memory, and his father, played with clear and gentle earnestness by David Tessier. For purists, this may feel unfair, but the stories do get told. Wendy Overly, David Rabinow, and Cliff Odle bring the famously drinking Auntie Hannah and two uncles to charming physical life, and Amanda Ruggiero creates a sidekick sister Nancy who is strung-out, lovable and memorable.
Powerful music
Songs lace the scenes and sentiments together nicely, particularly the stirring Sosban Fach, a Welsh song that holds some of the tribal wildness of the place in its minor melody, and reminds us why there were, as Thomas writes, wolves in Wales.
A major departure in the Child's Christmas narrative involves the introduction of truly boy-aged Thomas, done exceptionally well by Max Gleadow (the physical resonance a bonus) who witnesses two working class girls dealing with a duplicitous suitor. It's poignant, but an odd appendage.
But as relatives drift into the snows after the holiday, so must the poem draw closed, and we're back at the Chelsea with a sentimental but effective final tableau: the young Thomas looking out the narrow window while the present Thomas watches. Finally he puts the boy to sleep in the bed of his memory and wishes him Iechyd da, the Welsh phrase for "cheers." Had he stopped there, the crystal ending might have been ideal. But to hear a Happy Christmas, and then, a wholly unnecessary "Peace," was more than we required to feel the cover close on the storybook.
Perhaps, next year, the Gamm should return to the work with the stunning example of GATZ, allow characters to rise into habitation as they emerge, and allow the poet to tell his story... just this story. Something to ponder.
Photos, top to bottom: David Rabinow (Jim), Tom Gleadow (Dylan), David Tessier (Boy); Amanda Ruggiero (Nancy), David Tessier (Father), Wendy Overly (Auntie Hannah), Cliff Odle (Uncle Jim); Max Gleadow (Young Dylan), Tom Gleadow (Dylan). All photos Peter Goldberg.
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