Ray Bradbury’s Yestermorrows, Fremont Center Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., So. Pasadena 91030. Plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun. 3 pm; through Sept. 5. Tickets: $20. Seniors: $15. Students: $10. 323.960.4451. www.Plays411.com/raybradbury/
A month shy of his 89th birthday, Ray Bradbury is still a man of energetic impulses and exclamation points. His legendry joie de vivre may be tempered by advancing age and a stroke aftermath but ask the noted author of Fahrenheit 451 what he thinks about Amazon’s Kindle reading device and watch the punctuation fly.
“It’s not a book!” exclaims Bradbury during a recent afternoon visit to his Los Angeles home. “It doesn’t smell! I’m writing a poem right now called There Are Two Smells in the World That Are Beautiful. A new book has a great smell. An old book smells even better. It smells like Egyptian dust. Internets don’t smell, you see. And so, to hell with them!”
An ironic stance perhaps for someone whose stories predicted just such futuristic technologies more than 50 years ago but as a passionate library champion, Bradbury abhors any talk of marriage between the two. When reminded some of his own works are available for Kindle download, he scowls, “That’s no way to read! It’s not the same. There’s got to be texture! Texture is part of love. You don’t look at a woman, you touch her.” Then smiles, ever the incurable romantic.
David Fox-Brenton, Seth and Daniel Casanova in Yestermorrows
It is a quality clearly on display in his new evening of three one act plays entitled Ray Bradbury’s Yestermorrows on stage now at Fremont Theatre Center in South Pasadena through Sept. 5, produced by Bradbury and Raquel Lehrman, Theatre Planners and presented by Ray Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company. Directed by Alan Neal Hubbs, the plays include A Device Out of Time, The Cistern and Bradbury’s first, The Meadow, which hasn’t been seen on stage since its 1960 world premiere at the Huntington Hartford Theatre in Los Angeles.
Like the character Colonel Freeleigh in A Device Out of Time, Bradbury is his own time machine. Famous names, dates and places tumble off his tongue like the tone poems he interspersed throughout The Martian Chronicles, his homage to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Its lyrical language led Brave New World author Aldous Huxley to deem the first time novelist “a poet.”
Clad in a white wind breaker over a white dress shirt and shorts, accessorized with a purple neck scarf and a medal anointing him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic given by the French Ambassador in 2007, Bradbury embodies his own eccentric Don Quixote, defender of free speech, space exploration and good theatre. His den is a cluttered wonderland of fantastical things ranging from a Flexible Flyer sled propped up against a mounted original Prince Valiant comic strip signed by Hal Foster to a T-Rex dinosaur guarding both a Jules Verne Nautilus model and an Emmy statue earned for writing the teleplay of The Halloween Tree.
“I have impulses,” he exclaims with a wink, when asked why he decided to bring The Meadow back now. “I’m a lunatic! I’m a madman! Norman Corwin influenced me and became my friend and teacher when I was 26. The Meadow was my first radio drama. I submitted it to the World Security Workshop on ABC Radio and they broadcast it in 1947 starring James Whitmore. The play was then included in The Greatest One Act Plays of 1947-48. Not a bad start, eh?”
Not for a man who would later see his celebrated short stories turned into books, plays, screenplays, musicals, madrigals and even opera. Or who would famously tell the mayor and city council of Pasadena that the city’s future sustainability lay in rebuilding the then decimated Pasadena Playhouse.
2009 has been quite a year for Bradbury. His new collection of short stories We’ll Always Have Paris was published in February to good reviews. Falling Upward, which Bradbury considers his best play, based upon his experiences in Ireland while writing the film script of Moby Dick for John Huston from 1953-54, had a successful run at the El Portal starring Pat Harrington in March.
In April, during an LA Times Festival of Books appearance, Bradbury viewed the plaque recently installed in the basement of UCLA‘s Powell Library to commemorate his having written Fahrenheit 451 in its typing room (now research lab) using $9.80 worth of dimes. A fact, Bradbury points out, that permits him to call himself a true “dime novelist.”
“The plaque is too small,” he complains. “It’s only about so big.” He indicates a copy paper size with his hands. “People can’t see it. It’s got to be at least two feet square with a big arrow pointing to it saying, read this!”
In May, the California Artists Radio Theatre performed Leviathan 99 at the Writer’s Guild Theatre in honor of Norman Corwin’s 99th birthday with a cast that included William Shatner. Last month, Bradbury spoke at a fundraiser to help save Ventura’s H.P. Wright Library. The newly revived Saturday Evening Post just published his poem America in its July/August issue, with a new short story entitled Juggernaut due out in a few weeks.
Yesterday, the graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451 was released just in time for Bradbury’s upcoming appearance this Saturday at Comic-Con in San Diego, and is currently serialized in the July/August issue of Playboy. All before he turns 89 on August 22nd.
“They’ve done a beautiful job,” says Bradbury, showing the printer’s proof of the graphic novel. “It’s all there. All the important dialogue. All the important poetry.”
An Accidental Playwright
Actors in Yestermorrows
Bradbury credits the year he spent in early 1950s Ireland as the catalyst for his foray into playwriting. From 1953-54, he attended plays by Irish playwrights and fell in love with works by George Bernard Shaw, particularly St. Joan starring Siobhan McKenna. He saw movies as well but quickly soured on hearing the British anthem constantly played after the credits. The Irish, under British rule, would flee the theatre just before the music began.
“At the end of every movie, the British anthem came on,” Bradbury explains. “We saw movies, three or four nights in a row. And after the fifth night, I said ‘Jesus Christ! I’m going to put together a team of anthem sprinters to get out of the theatre ahead of these anthems!’ So I wrote a short story called The Anthem Sprinters. I later turned that into my first Irish play, which became part of Falling Upward. But it started with me seeing movies in Ireland.”
When Bradbury got back to the U.S., he began to write short stories about the Emerald Isle. In 1955, Charles Laughton asked him to write a play of Fahrenheit 451 only to be gently told later that it was horrible. He went back to the Irish stories to tackle them as plays. Writer Sy Gomberg staged a reading at his home with actors that included Strother Martin and James Whitmore to let Bradbury hear if the plays were any good.
“They read my plays to me and we all fell down,” recalls Bradbury. “They were funny! They were great! At last, I was a playwright.”
In 1960, a revised version of The Meadow became Bradbury’s first produced play with Whitmore reprising his role as the watchman. Four years later, Bradbury co-founded Pandemonium Theatre Company with director Charles Rome Smith and staged The World of Ray Bradbury, which contained The Pedestrian, The Veldt and The Chicago Abyss, at the Coronet Theatre. The production made a star of Harold Gould. A subsequent production at the New York’s Orpheum Theatre did not fare as well with the critics.
Did Bradbury remember his initial thinking behind the combination of those three plays or others since?
“I don’t think about things,” he states. “You know where I get my ideas?” He points to his heart. “Right here. It’s not up here,” pointing to his head. “My heart answers. And I put those plays together.”
Bradbury doesn’t think much of contemporary playwrights. When pressed, he cites Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
“That’s a good play, but there are very few others,” he allows. “I wanted Paul Newman to star in my plays. He read my plays. He said Ray, will you go get the plays of Pinter and read them? I’d like you to write like Harold Pinter. So I bought five books of plays by Pinter. I’d seen several of them. Then I sent a telegram to Newman – I REFUSE TO PRAISE PINTER TO PLEASE PAUL. Pinter was a lousy playwright. Later in his life he wrote better plays.”
Does the man who once was an usher at The Biltmore Theatre, Hollywood Bowl and Philharmonic Auditorium get out to see much theatre now?
“I can’t go because I can’t hear,” he sighs. “My own plays. It’s a shame. I’m having a rough time. They give me things to put on the ears but that doesn’t help much. It’s what’s inside the head. The flesh is disintegrating. The brain’s too big, you see!”
When asked what advice he would give a young writer who was torn between writing plays, short stories, novels or film, Bradbury offered his credo for creating a passionate life.
“If you have an impulse to try something, do it! Don’t think about things. Live your life. Explode! Do what you love and love what you do. That’s the rule. And the other thing I say to people is, go to the edge of the cliff, jump off and build your wings on the way down.
“Don’t build your wings up on the top of the cliff. Jump off and build them on the way down. That’s the way to live.”
Feature Image of Ray Bradbury by Eric Schwabel. Story images of David Fox-Benton, Seth Casanova and Daniel Casanova by Ed Krieger.
