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Making friends across the pond

Posted by DCA Theater on August 21, 2009 in July-December 2009 Season, Under Milk Wood

Written by Caffeine Artistic Director Jennifer Shook

In Dylan Thomas’ short life, he made enough friends to be claimed by many cities.  In this country, he remade the public reading of poetry a popular event in itself—spending some time in the City of Big Shoulders along the way.  Famously, he drank his last whiskeys at New York’s White Horse Tavern, but before that he threw back a few at Hyde Park’s Woodlawn Tap. 

Thomas’ sketch of his village of Llarregub Click here to enlarge.

It seems appropriate, then, that in the midst of tech rehearsals for Under Milk Wood I should get an email from the Dylan Thomas Centre of Swansea, Wales.  We are both, writes the Dylan Thomas Project Officer, “second cities,” and we are both currently dedicated to Thomas’ work.  As Anne Haden of “Dylan Down the Ups” (another recent correspondent) puts it, he “really was a man of the people.”

Thomas statue in the Swansea Marina

Thanks to the Chicago Tafia Society, Caffeine now has more friends in Wales than I could have imagined.  And submissions for the Dylan Thomas Coffeehouse Cabaret and Rev. Eli Jenkins’ Five and Country Senses poetry competition have been streaming in from Swansea, from County Cork, Ireland, from Amherst, Massachusetts, from Vilnius, Lithuania, and of course from writers and performers here in Chicago.

We’ll keep on celebrating shared culture throughout September with Under Milk Wood and at the Chicago Celtic Fest on September 12.

In the past Caffeine has staged the person of Ezra Pound and the plays of H.D. and T.S. Eliot—poets who left the U.S. for European homes.  It’s nice to see the traffic on the pond flows both ways.  After all, it’s in the dialogue of art across cultures that poetry and theatre (and culture) grow.