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2008-05-01

by Ed Rampell

'Fahrenheit 451'

Summary

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic is still red hot

Article

I love dystopian sci-fi, with its futuristic predictions of a totalitarian tomorrow gone terribly wrong. The hallmarks of these negative utopias include authoritarian governments that always tell us what to do (for our own goods, but of course), and jazzy high tech devices. Examples include: George Orwell’s 1984, with those terrifying two-way TVs through which Big Brother’s Thought Police spy on the proles; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with its bio-engineering and psychotropic Soma hallucinogens; Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, with its Skinnerian conditioning that’s ultimately more dehumanizing than Alex’s marauding droogies; H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Shape of Things to Come, with their prophecies of travel through time and outer space; etc.

One of the most enduring – and hair-raising -- of these negative dystopian classics is Ray Bradbury’s spine chilling Fahrenheit 451, which pits authoritarians against authors. Its clever tomorrowland conceit is that those terrifying firemen who don’t put out fires in a society where pre-fab homes, buildings, etc., are fireproof. Instead of extinguishing flames, Bradbury’s firemen are a sort of incendiary SWAT team urgently dispatched to burn books, wherever they may be found in a society where literature has been outlawed (to spare us from the inconvenience of thinking) and replaced by insipid TV. The police state has withered away and been replaced by the fireman’s state!

Bradbury’s philosophical novel was published in 1953, and its title rather famously refers to the temperature at which paper burns. In 1966, Francois Truffaut directed a so-so film version of it, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in a double role. The novel has also been adapted as an opera and since the 1970s, as a play (a theatrical version was performed as recently as 2002 at Burbank’s Falcon Theatre).

Now, the Fremont Centre Theatre is presenting a spine-tingling production of Fahrenheit 451, directed by Alan Neal Hubbs, resident director of Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company. Bradbury, the 87-year-old author of sci-fi books such as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, and of screenplays such as John Huston’s 1958 Moby Dick, is experiencing something of a latter day love affair with the theater. In September 2007, Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company premiered his Irish pub-set Falling Upward -- inspired by the bespectacled, white haired playwright’s misadventures while writing Moby Dick on location in Ireland -- at Theatre West near Universal City. Shortly afterwards, the Fremont presented Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, and in December a charming version of Bradbury’s quite quirky Noel likewise appeared at the Fremont, both productions directed by Hubbs. The Pulitzer Prize winning Bradbury has made a number of personal appearances at some of these performances, speaking and/or signing copies of his books.

In any case, the problem with adapting Fahrenheit 451 for the theater, especially a small one like the Fremont, is that the faux fires require a certain degree of pyrotechnical special effects that are more difficult to render onstage than they are on page or onscreen. (After all, you can’t shout fire in a crowded theatre!) Nevertheless, Hubbs’ deft mise-en-scene and John Blankenchip’s sparse set design manage to illumine Bradbury’s fiery saga. Although during the first act flames – real or simulated – seemed to cause the theatre to get hot and stuffy, causing discomfort for some audience members.

David Polcyn does a credible job as Montag (who is alternately played by Lee Holmes), the fireman whose uniform bears not the Nazi insignia of a swastika, but of a fire-breathing dragon. Racked by self doubt, Montag takes up reading the tomes he’s dispatched to burn. Like 1984’s Winston Smith, Montag is a tool of the state apparatus of repression who comes to question the very oppressive system he’s part and parcel. This leads to clashes with spouse Mildred (Meaghan Boeing), a complacent, suburban Stepford Wife zonked out on drugs and brain deadening television shows.

Montag also comes into conflict with his fellow firemen, notably his superior, Beatty, portrayed by veteran stage, screen and audiobook actor Michael Prichard, who depicted Captain Ahab in Leviathan ’99, Bradbury’s re-imagining of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in outer space. What a crafty bit of casting, to have a performer noted for recording over 500 books on tape co-star in a drama about the outlawing of and liquidation of books! The resistance of readers includes Jessica D. Stone as Montag’s muse Clarissa and the outstanding Stephen Robert Wollenberg as Faber, who both seek to illumine the bewildered arsonist of authors.

A common cliché of our time is that “everything changed after 9/11.” New York City firefighters are the iconic heroes of the tragedy at Ground Zero. It is therefore all the more shocking to the senses that in Fahrenheit 451 firemen are the villains. The current production is also resonant of the PATRIOT Act and other post-Sept. 11th measures of the national security and surveillance state. For instance, the spying librarians are compelled to participate in, informing on patrons’ book reading habits to the government. And upon receiving National Security Letters, librarians are even forbidden from discussing the surveillance the state is forcing them to conduct, at the risk of imprisonment. Then of course there’s the whole warrantless eavesdropping on phone calls, emails, bank records, etc., and the evasion of the FISA Court stipulations that Big Brother Bush’s regime, as well as telecommunications providers, have been implicated in.

It all sounds very Bradbury-esque – except I’ve heard that Ray Bradbury takes exception to these comparisons. The octogenarian publicly attacked Michael Moore for deriving the title of Fahrenheit 9/11 – the “temperature at which freedom [and the Constitution] burns” – from Fahrenheit 451. The Fremont’s otherwise handsomely designed program even insists that “F451 is not about censorship!” Well, thank you very much for telling audiences what to think in a production about thought control. In fact, a reasonable mind could easily deduce that Bradbury’s frightening fascistic firemen were, at least in part, inspired by Nazi book burnings of works by Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, etc., and that Fahrenheit 451 is a parable about censorship, among other things. This theatergoer for one still prefers to think for himself.

Perhaps Fahrenheit 451 remains too hot to handle.

Fahrenheit 451 runs at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena through June 1. Showtimes are. Thursday- Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m. For more information call 323/960-4451 or log onto www.Plays411.com/raybradbury.