"They loved me in America..."
May 5, 2003
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic
There appears to be a special anteroom of Hell that is reserved specifically for brilliant writers who have squandered their gifts. It is a crowded space. But among its most prominent and edgy inhabitants is Dylan Thomas, that inordinately gifted Welsh-bred poet who downed the potent cocktail of drink, promiscuity, fawning fans and self-disgust that led to his death at the age of 39, while on a reading tour in New York in 1953.
It is from this anteroom, in fact, that Thomas reports in "Do Not Go Gentle," the one-man show that has been handily written by Leon Pownall and was expertly performed over the weekend by Geraint Wyn Davies in the Upstairs space at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre on Navy Pier.
In tones alternately nostalgic, angry, bitter and, of course, wildly poetic, Thomas looks back at his childhood, his brief but blazing career, his women, his dissipation and the body of work that remains his legacy. It is a tragic tale written with sound and fury. Thomas did not "go gentle into that good night," though he surely did go far too soon.
Looking backward and trying to make an uneasy peace with himself, we find Thomas recalling his mostly blissful childhood; his bohemian affectations as a young poet who traded on his Welsh identity but was taught only English; his constant sense of living in the shadow of Shakespeare; his first love; his ensuing dysfunctional marriage to Caitlin, and his vulnerability to the cult of celebrity. This weakness was especially evident during his lucrative tours of America, where he became something of a self-parody and encountered all too many women who happily threw themselves at him at the very moment he was drowning himself in drink.
Davies, in an exceedingly controlled and polished performance, convincingly captures the poet's tempestuous spirit and self-propelled downfall. And when he relates the cause-of-death on Thomas' death certificate we feel the full impact of the words "insult to the brain"--words that exert a particularly stunning effect on the poet who is speaking to us from the next world. The actor's meditation on a writer's need for solitude also was superbly rendered.
Best of all, Davies winningly suggested the innocence of the poet in his boyhood, helped in this by the vestiges of a cherubic face that could easily recall that of Thomas as a coddled child. It was this charmed time that Thomas so vividly and sensually conjured in his memoir, A Child's Christmas in Wales. And the performance of scenes from that book--in which the poet recalled how he was fed by his grandfather with fantastic stories as well as foreshadowings of mortality, and given great helpings of Shakespeare by his father--were wholly beguiling.
Davies' rendering of Thomas' "greatest hits"--poems such as "Fern Hill," as well as the rage against mortality of the poem that lends the show its title--were spoken with eloquence and fire. Thomas called himself "a bit of a show-off" and mocked his own dizzying lyricism as "fishing boat-bobbing sea phrases." He was wrong. And this show will send you straight back to his collected works to rediscover the truth.
May 7, 2003