Audience Participation
Special Holiday Readers’ Theater
Swansea, Wales at Christmas
A Child’s Christmas in Wales is a tale told by poet Dylan Thomas about the Christmases he enjoyed as a boy in his hometown of Swansea, Wales on the west coast of Great Britain. It is a joyful tale, and beautiful to hear when read aloud.
Phil has turned the poem into a play for ten parts, and invites members of the audience to join him in telling it aloud. He also invites members to read with him one of Dylan Thomas’ most famous poems, Fern Hill, and also to read with him an all-time favorite, Twas the Night Before Christmas. It should be a warm and lovely evening for all of us. It runs about 75 minutes.
Children of course are invited to attend, but the readings will be done by adults.
Admission is free.
Audio sample of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
For some time I’ve been wanting to provide people with an opportunity to ‘act’ without having to work at it. So I have taken a play—the Wizard of Oz—and reassigned the lines so that all the characters have the same number of words. Then I wrote up scripts for each character, and I invite members of the audience to choose a part they’d like to do, give them a script & tell them to “give it their best shot,” to read the part with as much zest as possible.
And they do! Believe me, they do! It’s amazing how ‘zesty’ normal people become when you give them a play script and ask them to read it aloud!