A Welsh play - WEST
Event report by WSWNE President Susan Davies Sit
Actor and Director: Gareth John Bale
I counted 43 people watching WEST, live from Wales on St. Valentine’s Day afternoon, all across the USA and Canada. With us was the author of the play, and of Grav, a play we had seen at NAFOW a couple of years ago, Owen Thomas who answered several of our questions. The performance was by actor and director Gareth John Bale and actor Gwenllian Higginson.
I shed a few tears several times through the play, tears of Hiraeth. But I was also smiling all the time too, as the young couple in 1890 courted from opposite farms, he too shy to speak up, they stumbled along until a kiss, an embrace, a marriage in the chapel, a farm to run. Then a flyer arrives: opportunities in America and the ever so hard decision of whether to board a ship or not. The goodbyes in Wales were hard. The best lines in the poem-like rhyming dialogue were describing the homesickness as it “sleeps like a dragon in the cave of our hearts”. Hiraeth.
Look out for this play, it will give you the deep understanding of your ancestors coming to America from Wales, whatever the year.
Susan Davies Sit