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September 2014 Spotlight Draft 1 The Theatre Arts Management Shop at Catawba College Shuford School of Performing Arts Presents: MC EPPTHE HOUSE: SPOTLIGHT CATAWBA COLLEGE 2300 West Innes St. September 2014 Vol 21, No. 5 www.catawba.edu/theatrearts Salisbury, NC 28144 TELEPHONE (704) 637-4481 EMAIL THEATREARTS @CATAWBA.EDU Co-Editor: Verity Pryor-Harden Kicking off the 2014-2015 season [email protected] with and English classic! Co-Editor: Pen Chance [email protected] THIS MONTH UPCOMING PRODUCTION: UNDER MILK WOOD Directed by trivia wizard Dave Pulliam, learn about this English classic and how the cast will not only perform onstage, but also a live radio broadcast! Continued on Page 2 WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER Current students share their experiences working in Jean White, Anna Kate Hall, & Lauren Stacks in Under Milk Wood professional Summer Stock theaters. (Photo by Tracy Ratliff) Continued on Page 5 ALUMNUS OF THE MONTH: JERRY ARCHER Recent 2014 alumnus is living in the land where dreams come true! Continued on Page 6 LITTLE BLUE BOOK Morgan Summers, Laurel Edge, Martha Brucker at the Zach Dietz & Trey Irby Interested to see what goes on behind the scenes? Blue Masque Olympics (Photo by Katlyn Shaw) (Photo by Tracy Ratliff) This new photo feature shows you the students of the theatre department outside the classroom and off stage! Continued on Page 7 Like us on Facebook: /catawbatheatre | Follow us on Twitter: @CatawbaTheatre | Follow us on Instagram: @catawbatheatre THE SPOTLIGHT PAGE2 Under Milk Wood by Sarah Taylor, Sophomore, & David Pulliam, Theatre Arts Professor Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas's last work and only play, opens the 2014-2015 Under Milk Wood season for Catawba College's award winning Theatre Arts Department. The production runs at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 23rd through Saturday, September 27th in Hedrick by Dylan Thomas Little Theatre on campus. The play was first broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) September 23-27, 2014 in 1954, with actor Richard Burton, a Welshman, as narrator. It became an instant classic. Set in the fictional Welsh fishing town of Llareggub, it explores 7:30 p.m. the lives of a variety of characters, including Captain Cat, Organ Morgan and Polly Garter, all denizens of a town which has "fallen head over bells in Hedrick Little Theater love." In a first for Catawba College Theatre, and as playwright Dylan Thomas intended, Under Milk Wood will be broadcast live on the radio on its opening $12, adults night. The production can be heard beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, $10, senior adults and September 23rd, on Salisbury's Memories 1280, WSAT. Additionally, all non-Catawba students performances during the run of this show will be streamed live on the college website at www.catawba.edu/milkwood. The Catawba production of Under www.catawba.edu/theatretix Milk Wood is also being staged this year as an opportunity to commemorate the (704) 637-4481 centenary of Dylan Thomas' birth. Thomas' hilarious account of nobodies in a tiny town brings the characters' innermost feelings to life through their dreams. Captain Cat reveals his life at sea, while Polly Garter pines over her dead lover. As each First Voice: Trey Irby character awakens, they must deal with the fact that their feelings affect Second Voice: Tabitha Bass everything they do. Richard Burton put it much more succinctly when he Multiple Characters: Addison Bevis claimed "the entire thing is about religion, the idea of death and sex." Multiple Characters: Arnold Blohme As with his poetry, Thomas' play Under Milk Wood relies on the clang of its Multiple Characters: Chaz Cable lines and the pictures evoked by its words to communicate meaning. Catawba's cast members are working hard to capture that essential Multiple Characters: Zach Deitz “Welshness” in this production and have spent considerable time learning the Multiple Characters: Eric English* Welsh dialect. The actors will also play multiple roles using multiple voices Multiple Characters: Kayla Guffey with the sound effects coming from the sound table using old-timey, hand- Multiple Characters: Anna Kate Hall cranked wind and rain machines, coconut shells to create the sound of horse Multiple Characters: Duane Leatherberry hooves, and with actors also bleating like sheep or calling like gulls. Multiple Characters: Hannah Lee* Multiple Characters: Shannon O’Donnell* Multiple Characters: Lauren Stacks Multiple Characters: Melissa Tarduno* Multiple Characters: Jean White* * Denotes membership in Alpha Psi Omega Dramatic Honors Society Under Milk Wood cast members from left to right: Zach Dietz, Lauren Stacks, Trey Irby, Anna Kate Hall, Jean White, Eric English (Photo by Tracy Ratliff) Like us on Facebook: /catawbatheatre | Follow us on Twitter: @CatawbaTheatre | Follow us on Instagram: @catawbatheatre THE SPOTLIGHT PAGE3 About the Playwright: Dylan Thomas by Emily Olszewski, Senior, featuring Dr. Janice Fuller Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands West End. They were introduced by Augustus comatose around noon on the 9th of area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on John, who was Macnamara's lover at the time. A November. October 27th, 1914. He was son to David drunken Thomas proposed to Macnamara on John Thomas, and English teacher, and the spot, and the two began a courtship. On July Dr. Janice Fuller of Catawba College’s Florence Hannah Thomas, a seamstress. 11, 1937, Thomas married Macnamara in English department had this to say about Although his father and mother were both Penzance, Cornwall. They had three children Thomas: bilingual in English and Welsh, Thomas and over a span of 10 years. “One hundred years after his birth, his sister were both brought up speaking Often considered his greatest single work, Dylan Thomas is being celebrated only English. Dylan Thomas’ youth was Under Milk Wood, a radio play featuring the throughout the world. Perhaps most spent mostly in Swansea with occasional characters of Llareggub, is set in a fictional compelling to his admirers is his passion for visits to the rural Carmarthenshire Farms, Welsh fishing village ('Llareggub' is 'Bugger All' the music of words. No one can command which inspired a great amount of his work. backwards, implying that there is absolutely both the ethereal and the raucous sounds of In October 1925, Thomas attended the nothing to do there). The play took several years language more than he. Dylan’s father did Swansea Grammar School where his father to write, the first half mostly in South Leigh, not teach him Welsh because he himself had taught. Thomas's first poem was published Oxford, in 1948, and the second half was mostly been reviled and denied jobs because he in the school's magazine in which, he later written in America in May of 1953. spoke Welsh. Yet the English of Dylan’s became the editor of. Between 1930 and Upon his fourth trip to New York City in poems and plays echoes the chiming Welsh 1934, he began keeping poetry notebooks 1953 to partake in a production of Under Milk consonants that he heard around him all his and amassed 200 poems in four such Wood, Dylan Thomas was suffering from severe life. At a time when the English were journals. He left school at 16 to become a chest pains. By November 2nd, air pollution in marginalizing the Welsh more than ever, reporter for the local newspaper, the South New York was at an all-time high with over 200 Dylan’s youthful desire to escape his Wales Daily Post, only to leave the job under people dying from smog inhalation. On homeland was natural. Yet, when he was pressure 18 months later in 1932. Of the 90 November 3rd, Thomas spent his day drinking away, he always longed for the only place he poems he published, half were written heavily until finally contacting a doctor who gave felt he be could fully creative—rural, small- during these first years following his leave of Thomas morphine, resulting in extremely town Wales. By the end of his life, as he was the Post. He then joined an amateur difficult breathing and his face turning blue. He crafting Under Milk Wood, he could not resist dramatic group in Mumbles called Little was taken to St. Vincent’s hospital at embracing the bizarre characters of his Theatre (now known as Swansea Little approximately 2 a.m. in a coma and treated for favorite small towns—Laugharne and New Theatre), but still continued to work as a “acute alcoholic encephalopathy”. However, an Quay. Today, when the Welsh language and freelance journalist for a few more years. X-ray showed bronchitis in all parts of the culture are more resurgent than ever, we are In the spring of 1936, Dylan Thomas bronchial tree and pneumonia. Sadly, the lucky to get to hear Thomas’s rollicking met dancer Caitlin Macnamara in London's pneumonia worsened and Dylan Thomas died celebration.” ABOUT THE PLAY by Peyton Glendinning, Freshman Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood takes the audience on a journey through the town of Llareggub, a fictional town in south Wales. Beginning when he was 17, it took Thomas twenty years to complete the piece because he constantly worked on the play in increments throughout his life. His favorite place to write was in his poetry room, which was surrounded by milk wood, hence the title (even though, for a while, the working title was “The Town That Was Mad”). In fact, since this piece was a side project for Thomas’ most of his life, when it first took stage opening night, Thomas hadn’t written an ending. He wrote the ending right after the curtain had gone up and handed out the copies to the actors at intermission. Two weeks before he died, Thomas did a solo performance of Under Milk Wood.
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  • Dylan Thomas Resources
    Dylan Thomas was born on the 27th October Cwmdonkin Avenue is located in a position that 1914 at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, a semi-detached is high above Swansea Bay. As young boy Dylan house in the Uplands area of Swansea. would have looked out on the sea every day. 1914 was a momentous year for the World The changing moods of this wide, curving seascape because of the outbreak of the Great War. would have a lasting impact on the imagination of the poet to be. His father was an English teacher and although both his parents could speak Welsh, he and his Dylan would continue to live and work for much sister Nancy were brought up as English speakers. of his life in locations with magnificent sea views. WG22992 © Hawlfraint y Goron / Crown Copyright 2014 / Crown WG22992 © Hawlfraint y Goron www.cadw.wales.gov.uk/learning At Swansea Waterfront a statue of Dylan as a young boy sits looking out over the docks and Although Dylan Thomas did not write in Welsh, at the people who stroll by. The sculptor John the inspiration for much of his work was rooted in Doubleday has shown the poet perched on the the closeness he felt for Wales, its people and its edge of his chair. He looks like he has been caught landscape. The historic town of Laugharne, with its in the moment of creative thought. magnificent castle and its swirling estuary provided him with many creative writing opportunities. He Dylan began to write at a young age. He was a wrote ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog’ from teenager when he began to keep the notebooks the gazebo that is set into the imposing walls of into which he poured his writing ideas, especially the Castle.
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