Here, in the masterpiece completed just before his death in 1953, Dylan Thomas gave fullest expression to his sense of the magnificent flavor and variety of life. A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coast town, Under Milk Wood begins with dreams and ghosts before dawn, moves through the brilliant, noisy day of the townspeople and closes as the “rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night.” As Randall Jarrell wrote: “It would be hard for any work of art to communicate more directly and funnily and lovingly what it is like to be alive.” Dylan Thomas called it “a play for voices,” and although it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation it had its first performances in New York, a series of try-outs in “concert” form, with Thomas directing and reading several parts.
