Christmas nostalgia alert! Flip the TV remote any December evening and you’ll find a cascade of hard-sell Christmas advertisements wrapped around bundles of Hollywood-style sentiment. “Bah, humbug!” to quote Ebenezer Scrooge.
And yet, what is Christmas without sentiment? Without nostalgia?
The challenge, harder every year, requires separating the few authentic treats from synthetic treacle.
In Chestertown, we will have a special opportunity to enjoy one of these rare treats this weekend when the Garfield Center for the Arts at the Prince Theatre presents its live adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
Like the Welsh poet himself, Thomas’s most popular work had an erratic history, slowly rising to the level of a Christmas classic. After passing through iterations as BBC radio broadcasts beginning in 1937, the work emerged full-blown in America in 1950 when it was purchased by Harper’s Bazaar magazine for $300.
Fans sometimes debate whether the piece is a poem, a prose poem or short story. That hardly matters. It certainly didn’t to Thomas. What mattered to him, always, were the words.
“I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. … I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly …”
The poet shaped A Child’s Christmas as a bittersweet gallery of images. An older narrator recalls Christmases of his youth to a boy, impatient for time to hurry until his Christmas arrives. Along the way, the narrator paints word scenes, subtly contrasting a semi-mythical past of yesteryear with how things are at present.
“Our snow … came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms, and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ived the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”
Lucia Foster, Producing Artistic Director at the Garfield Center, first encountered the work when she attended a staged reading here a decade ago at the Kent County Arts Council. Tim Maloney, professor of dramatic art at Washington College, narrated that version. Foster quickly signed him as the narrator for her new version. She also recruited music director/ piano player Mickey Dulin, who wrote and plays a score that supports the story with six holiday carols.
In another touch of originality, Foster incorporated 12 local child actors to illustrate the scenes. During rehearsals, Foster taught the children first to play with the rich language then make it their own.
Local favorites in the community theatres here will play the all-important roles of uncles and aunts. As the narrator recalls:
“There were always uncles at Christmas. The same uncles … without their collars … trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arm’s length … and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, [sitting] on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break like faded cups and saucers.”
The Garfield’s doors will open early at 5:30 pm on Saturday, December 8, so the theatre can house a culminating event for this year’s Colonial Days Holiday House tour. Music and refreshments will be available prior to the play’s performance, which begins at 6:30 pm that night.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales: An Original interpretation of Dylan Thomas’s classic poem – fun for all ages! Friday, Dec.7 @ 8 pm; Saturday, Dec. 8 @ 6:30 pm; Sunday, Dec. 9 @ 3 pm. Tickets: $10/ $5 (students with ID), available from the Garfield box office 410-810-2060 or [email protected]
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