Other Voices

Director Jim Milton says he was attracted to theater because, being raised as a Cathoic, he found this Biblical phrase profound: “The Word was made flesh.”

“To me, words are sacred,” Milton says in this week’s podcast. “Words are almost living things.”

Milton, who lives in Tannersville in the Catskills, has adapted Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”  and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” for the stage. He shortened Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” in iambic pentameter, by one-fifth, writing it in tetrameter instead.

Milton is currently directing Jack Cunningham’s “Women and War” — a collection of fictional stories based on historical fact. Online performances are at 7 p.m. on July 1 and 2 with a live performance at Conkling Hall in Rensselaerville on July 3, also at 7 p.m. Three couples — with the men fighting in Europe during World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam — correspond through letters. Milton directs the actors to focus on the words and the emotions carried on those words.

“They call theater the fabulous invalid,” says Milton, noting the impending death of theater has been proclaimed with the advent of movies, then of television, and now of the internet. “We are a species for which stories are important,” says Milton, whether they are told through religion, in newspapers, in novels or on stage.

“Theater is one of the major ways in which a community can come together,” he said. A play is not etched in stone like a movie. “It can’t react when you laugh; it can react when you cry. You are part of the play,” he said.

Asked who should watch “Women and War,” Milton said, “The audience is anyone who is curious about our history, which of course should be everyone.”