Sustenance for a winter evening

“The world doesn’t need us—it will be a better place without us,” says Omar, the nihilistic gigolo in a new Off-Broadway play by Alan Ball, the creator of television’s “Six Feet Under.”

“But, what about art and music and poetry?” says his lover.

“We need them,” replies Omar, “not the world. The world doesn’t need them.” The world will be fine without us and our creations, he thinks, and when he says it, in his casual, authoritative way, we believe him and are, by turns, horrified and relieved and encouraged to make more of them while we can.

A cold, dark February is upon us in the river valley, and elsewhere, and music and art and poetry are all around us. Here is a bit of encouragement, in defiance of Omar, to partake of it.

The Upper Delaware Writers Collective—of which I am part—is calling on all of its collective skills in presenting an evening with Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milkwood” at the NACL theatre in Highland Lake on Thursday, February 8 at 8:00 pm.

The production is a staged reading of the “play for voices” Thomas had just finished when he died, in 1953, at age 39. He never saw it produced, but left behind a recording of him reading “First Voice” and directing. “First Voice” is the role our director, Tom Lisenbee, graciously assigned me for this production. Tom, a fine storyteller, poet/performer in his own right, reads “Second Voice.” His face is a map of the Welsh countryside, weathered and worn, with a ragged beauty. He intones Thomas’ poetry passionately.

The play, originally for radio, follows the fictional town of Llareggub, in Thomas’ native Wales, through a day in spring—which in Wales is equivalent to our February, with its cold moist air—from sunrise to nightfall. Llareggub—it has been noted that a backwards look at the name spells Buggerall—is a bawdy town, but no bawdier than most, one supposes, once the covers are lifted.

Lift them, he does, as we hear the inner thoughts and rumours and innuendoes of the townspeople. There is the fish-wife Polly Garter, who longs for the arms of her long-dead lover Willie Wee, even as she enjoys the amorous attentions of Mr. Waldo. There are the pinings of the two would-be lovers, Mr. Mog Edwards and Miss Price, who connect passionately only by post, which suits them both, and the harmless silly sex games played out in the marital rooms of Mr. and Mrs. Willy Nilly.

There is Captain Cat, the blind sea-captain, played here by my husband Jim Stratton, who sees all, tells all, by the sounds of foot-steps on the cobbles below his window, and who daily wakes the slumbering town with his loud “get out of bed” bell.

There is a townful of desire and woe and bawdy fun and lonely aching in the characters of Llareggub, the “babies... farmers, fishers, tradesmen, and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, undertaker and fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman... and the tidy wives.” Through them, the playwright uncovers all that is worthy and low about us humans, and reminds us of how lucky we are to be alive, even in cold dark February.

His Llareggub is an everytown, a bawdy “Our Town,” maybe even your town.

I dearly hope to see your breath, reader, warming the night air, as you scurry from your car across the churchyard of the theatre in Highland Lake and enter the warm arms of “Under Milkwood” and laugh with us and feel alive.

The world may not need us, but we need art and love and poetry, and each other’s company, now, as forever, maybe more than ever.

- Cass Collins