‘Under Milk Wood’s’ Many Roles Require a Scorecard

Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood” is a miscalculated choice for A Noise Within’s second show on the company’s spacious new stage at Luckman Theatre on the Cal State L.A. campus.

An episodic glimpse of 24 hours in the life of a small Welsh town, it was originally written for radio. Thomas used fiercely lyrical language, dotted with Welsh names and other unfamiliar terms.

The best way to imbibe “Under Milk Wood” is probably on tape, with no visual distractions except for a copy of the text. When you meet 69 characters in 90 minutes, it would be handy to stop the tape occasionally to sort out a few details, even though this would impede the flow of the verse.

A Noise Within isn’t the first company to stage “Under Milk Wood,” but the ideal conditions for staging it are almost mutually exclusive: A huge cast in a tiny space would work best. More actors would mean less sharing of parts, which might clarify the characters. A small space would encourage the sense of intimacy that you might get from a radio.

Here, we have a relatively small cast in a large space. Although director Dan Kern uses 10 actors, William Dennis Hunt and Carol Mayo Jenkins play only narrators’ roles, so the other eight actors must split 67 roles among them.

While an actor may enjoy the challenge of playing as many as 10 characters within 90 minutes, it becomes a blur for audience members who aren’t already intimately familiar with the material. The first few minutes are especially daunting, as the audience must adjust not only to Thomas’ dense language but also to the notion of meeting sleeping characters in their dreams before we meet them in their daily lives.

The production doesn’t begin to fill the sides and rear of the stage. Maybe this small show was a purposeful balance to all the action within the company’s other current plays, “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” This won’t mean much to those who are seeing the company for the first time.

The actors can’t be faulted. Kern tries to warm up the space at the beginning with a dash of choral singing instead of the silence suggested in the text. Michael C. Smith’s spare set--a ring of everyday props and a model lighthouse at the back of the stage--succeeds in evoking an arena for incantatory storytelling. But these particular stories might have registered more strongly in the company’s previous, smaller space.

* “Under Milk Wood,” Luckman Theatre, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive. This Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Oct. 28-29, Nov. 6, 11-12, 8 p.m. (323) 224-6420. $26-$30. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

William Dennis Hunt: 1st Voice

Carol Mayo Jenkins: 2nd Voice

Ann Marie Lee, Gail Shapiro, Hisa Takakuwa, Keri Hostetler, Alan Brooks, Joel Swetow, Mitchell Edmonds, Peter Dillard: Ensemble

Written by Dylan Thomas. Directed by Dan Kern. Set by Michael C. Smith. Costumes by Charles Tomlinson. Lighting by James Taylor. Stage manager GiGi Garcia.