In Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, firemen don't put out fires, they start them. The tools of their trade aren't hoses but flamethrowers. In this dystopian future, Americans have become so dumbed-down by material gratification and passive media consumption that they've simply stopped reading. Books have been outlawed, since the act of reading leads to critical and independent thought. Anyone who owns a book is considered either insane or subversive.
Fahrenheit 451 (the title refers to the temperature at which paper supposedly ignites) is one of those sci-fi classics that is chillingly prophetic. Bradbury wrote it in the early 1950s, when television was in its infancy, but he already perceived that the boob tube was "dimming out the human," as reformed adman Jerry Mander later put it—numbing and isolating us, not only mediating reality but replacing it.
The Literature to Life series at Hartford's Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts implicitly confronts our post-literary culture, in which a majority of adults are said to be "aliterate"—people who are able to read, but don't. The collaboration with the American Place Theatre in New York presents 60-minute, one-person stage adaptations of literary works to ignite an interest in reading them.The series, which ends its third season next week, focuses on books that grapple with significant social themes.
The Fahrenheit 451 dramatization, coming to the Bushnell next week, underlines the series' theme of defending the written word from neglect or censorship. Rich Orlow portrays Guy Montag, a fireman who accidentally reads part of a book he has been sent to destroy and starts wondering what makes it so dangerous. His curiosity leads him into an underground world of secret bookworms who commit texts to memory. Like medieval monks, they are safeguarding the written word until the dark ages pass.
The Bushnell performances include an evening show for the public and a couple for schoolchildren. They are introduced with short talks by a teaching artist from the American Place Theatre. The evening show features a lecture—novelist Kit Reed gives next week's.
After each performance of Fahrenheit 451,, volunteers plucked from the audience will read short excerpts from books "worthy of preservation." The list includes Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea and The Bluest Eye. In the context of Ray Bradbury's prescient book, that simple recitation can be seen as an act of defiance.
Fahrenheit 451: The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford, May 4, 7 p.m., (860) 987-5900.
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Ameriville
First off, full disclosure: I work for New World Theater, which is presenting Ameriville this week at UMass. But I have been a fan of Universes, the show's creators, for years. The ensemble is probably the foremost exponent of Future Aesthetics, the cross-disciplinary hybrid developed by writer/performers coming out of hip-hop and the performance poetry scene.
The Bronx-based multiracial quartet of Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz, Gamal Abdel Chasten and Ninja (William Ruiz) draw on a global multitude of lyrical and musical influences and performance styles. Their high-energy performances fuse poetry, storytelling, rhythm and song into exhilarating theater.
Universes' first full-length piece, Slanguage, seen here in 2001, took its audience on a whimsical/bizarre subway ride through New York's underside. Their latest, Ameriville, looks at the post-9/11 United States through the prism of post-Katrina New Orleans. It comes to UMass from its premiere at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky. last month—the only ensemble piece invited to the prestigious event.
I saw an early version of Ameriville last summer in a workshop—or rather, a "workshit," as Steven Sapp put it, "where we work our shit out." The piece was originally conceived as a take on the 1939 Orson Welles radio drama War of the Worlds, which provoked a nationwide panic when it related an alien invasion through news flashes. That parallel to the terror-threat mindset in the wake of 9/11 eventually shifted to focus on New Orleans as a microcosm of the nation—first assaulted by an external force, then brutalized by a deceitful government.
The piece takes the form of character monologues, punctuated with song and rhythm, by New Orleanians whose lives were devastated by the hurricane—houses destroyed, livelihoods gone, struggling to stay afloat by hook or, in some cases, crook. But they also reflect a cross-section of the broader American public in a time of fear, uncertainty and growing anger.
Ameriville: April 30-May 1, 8 p.m., Bowker Auditorium, UMass-Amherst, (413) 545-2511, www.umass.edu/fac.
