The first time I heard Dylan Thomas’s classic poem, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” it was just after a typically enormous Thanksgiving meal and we were all cuddled up around a woodstove in a New Hampshire farmhouse listening to the sonorous, Welsh-accented voice of Mr. Thomas himself purring on about snow for six days and six nights when he was twelve, or twelve days and twelve nights when he was six. His frenetic, disjointed style captured each of his fleeting memories of cold mailmen and burning houses and happy uncles in Wales in a mushed-up, run-together way that recalled exactly every warm winter mood in Wyoming, and brought us together, this poet and I, across oceans and years.
“All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.”
Unfortunately, the very quality that makes Thomas’s poem so universal is what makes the feelings it invokes so difficult to convey in a medium as realistic and inflexible as live theater. But fortunately for us, the Stone Soup Theatre troupe, under the excellent direction of Arlene Martinez-Vickers and including the charming performance of Sophia Mitri-Schloss playing a young Mr. Thomas, has found a way to roll the poem’s glowing sensibility into a warm-hearted, delightfully-staged single act that makes Thomas’s Christmas as real as our own.
When a few tone-setting carols fade out and Christmas day begins in earnest onstage, the theater’s talent quickly makes itself apparent. Lonnie Tristan Renteria shines as Glyn, an uncle with Communist leanings in industrial South Wales, and action is occasionally punctuated by recitations of parts of the original poem by Tom Stewart, who reads it nearly as well as the veritable author himself.
But from the very first, it is the children, and Miss Mitri-Schloss in particular, who steal the show. It is worth attending if for nothing else than to witness her telling of a Welsh ghost story that openly terrifies Uncle Glyn in the show, but must have secretly terrified every single member of the audience. But Mrs. Martinez-Vickers has drawn equally strong performances out of Guthrie Sutton, Halina Scott-Smith, Daphne Matter, and Stewart Kuehne, and the young stars, out of exuberance alone, make Thomas’s words glow with the spirit of Christmas.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales can be seen at the Stone Soup Theatre at 4029 Stone Way, on the corner of 41st. The show runs at 7:30 pm on 12/21, 12/22, and every Friday and Saturday evening through the 24th. There are also matinees at 2 pm 12/17, 12/18, and from 12/21-24. Tickets can be purchased here, or by phoning the box office at (206) 633-1883.