An ‘Under Milk Wood’ under the stars

Shakespeare has traditionally fared well at the outdoor Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, frequently earning kudos for artistic director Ellen Geer and her acting ensembles.

“Under Milk Wood” by Dylan Thomas -- Shakespeare’s lyrical, 20th century kindred spirit -- would seem a natural, especially beneath a night sky on a rough-planked stage that merges into tangled brush and arching oak trees.

The company misses the mark, however, with a shallow production of this challenging portrait of a day in the life of a small Welsh town.

Under Geer’s loose-reined direction, an uneven cast inhabits with only fleeting success the multilayered, dark and light reality of Thomas’ piercingly observed fools and pedants, henpecked husbands, gossips, lovers, perverts and poets.

With revelations of character alive in the vaulting heart and humor of the text, some in the cast skim the surface with sitcom-style tics and other physical and tonal exaggerations.

The back-and-forth, up-and-down of the physical movement too -- at extreme stage right and left and on different set levels -- breaks connecting threads among the characters and between the actors and the audience, despite help from Jeff Teeter’s nimble light design.

Richard Gould and Katherine Griffith are powerful in the spotlight as lead narrators, but Griffith’s effect is diluted as she changes character in weak secondary roles. Gould’s narrator-as-Dylan Thomas serves as the production’s spiritual core, but he is crammed for much of the play behind a saloon bar, and the character’s inevitable descent into drunkenness and melancholy becomes another distraction, to the point of impinging on the play itself.

The exceptional standout is Melora Marshall, fully present in the rhythm and world of the play as acquiescent Polly Garter, the town’s fallen woman, whose heart belongs to a dead lover. In those and other scattered moments of authenticity, Thomas’ earthy, poignant vision blooms.

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‘Under Milk Wood’

Where: Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga

When: Through July: 8 p.m. Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays.

Aug. 1 and the month of September: 7:30 p.m. Sundays. The month of August and Oct. 2 and 9: 3 p.m. Saturdays.

Ends: Oct. 9

Price: $14 and $25

Contact: (310) 455-3723

Running time: 2 hours