Monday, October 28, 2013

Under Milkwood, 1988


I am sorry that my current duties have kept me away from adding any Blog posts in a while.
We just finished a nice production of Almost, Maine at Brockport.
This past week I had two music concerts and the student production opens this week.
Back to my life in theatre, so where was I when we last spoke:
In December of 1988 we did a production of Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood.
Our mainstage theatre is a standard proscenium auditorium and seats 400 but for this production the play was done in our smaller intimate black box theatre which seats only 100.
The seating which is flexible was set up in stadium style, with two sections of seats on opposite sides of the theatre, like a small football field.
The set was simple with the floor covered with carpeting the was cut to the shape of Wales.
I am sure that most people did not know it was suppose to be except an irregular shape on the floor.
The only other set pieces were several 20" high sections of logs used as seats.
And as with many other show over my 32 years at Brockport, I think I still have a few of the logs down in our Basement.
We are lucky as we have a large storage area and are able to save many set pieces that we can reuse.

For our current production of Avenue Q we pulled up some large old window frames that had not been used in over 18 years and took them apart and then re-cut them to make new windows.
I call easily tell that the windows were made years ago by the quality of the wood used to build them.
The wood is almost know free and not warped too much.
Sometimes when I rip new wood on the table saw you can see the wood curl as the blade splits it.
The new show has a big set and I am trying to save money by re-using whatever I can.
I have to weigh how much time and work it will take to tear apart an old set piece and if we will get enough good wood to make it worth the effort.
The old windows came apart fairly easily and already have been made into six new window frames.

Back to Under Milkwood.
Written as a radio drama it was adapted for the stage in 1954 and called a play for voices.
We were lucky as we had an actress cats in the play who was Welsh and was very helpful with the Welsh language and terms used in the play.
A small cast, only about half of them were students and the rest were faculty and staff members from various department on campus.

Only about half of the play was acted out while several actors read narration standing at podiums.
The same director would use a similar format when we did a production of John Brown's Body some years later.
The lighting was dark, moody and very effective for Under Milkwood but I never was able to get any good photographs of it, but I will post what I have.
This of course was back when we used film in cameras, digital cameras were still years away.
Under Milkwood was very different from most of the plays we had done and I enjoyed it.

I am sure that most of the students who had to see it for class did not like it because they had to pay attention and really listen to what was being said.
But then again even when we do something lighter many of the students who are required to see the plays do not enjoy them either.
I think we might do better with our next play Avenue Q coming up next month.

The plays we did in the spring of 1989 were both very different from  our normal productions and offered unique challenges.
* * *