Skip the Eighteen Whiskeys and Have Some Eggnog: Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

If you’re looking for something fun to do over the holidays, look no further than the Irish Rep, our favorite neighborhood theatre, right around the corner on 22^nd St. They’re staging a delightful production of former Chelsea Hotel resident Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” The play is based on Thomas’s famous 1954 poem of the same name, which, in case you’re not familiar, is pretty much what it sounds like, the author’s remembrance of a snowy childhood Christmas—though they all run together for him and Thomas “. . .can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” The special thing about the poem is that it quickly becomes an evocation of all the Christmases that ever were and ever will be. Here you have excited kids opening presents and running around the tree, and old aunts fussing over the dinner as fat uncles sit smoking their pipes by the fire. There’s turkey and goose and blazing pudding and elderberry wine (sorry, no eggnog); there’s Mrs. Fogarty’s horrendous Christmas cake; and young Dylan and his friends chase cats with snowballs and sing carols at neighbors’ doors. And of course, in case you didn’t catch it the first couple times, there’s plenty of snow:

Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash

buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground

and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and

bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the

roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather

moss, minutely white ivied the walls and settled on

the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb

thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.

At the end of the long, exciting day, “Always on Christmas night there was music.” Well, not so much in the poem, but the play (adapted and directed by Charlotte Moore) supplements its words with a couple dozen Christmas carols, all sung by the stellar cast. In fact they are all so good that it’s almost a crime to single any one actor out, although Jay Aubrey Jones, with his booming voice, is almost the perfect holiday uncle, and Kylie Kuioka is delightfully chirpy and cheery as an excited kid on Christmas morning. Kerry Conte, Ali Ewolt, Dan Macke, and Ashley Robinson are all equally exceptional—so there, since I’ve mentioned them, crime mitigated, I suppose. Thomas (in)famously downed eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern before staggering back to the Chelsea Hotel, but he’s not dying in this one. Quintessential holiday entertainment. (Thomas’s room at the Hotel, 205, which had been on the chopping block is now reportedly being spared. Lets hope this is true.)