June 6, 7 & 8 in the Knight Theatre at Barnstable High School
We have everything that we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. So thinks Fireman Guy Montag in this dystopian society which springs from the fertile mind of Ray Bradbury and has its genesis in the burning of books by Hitler and the burning of the library at Alexandria. With books outlawed and people psychologically and intellectually numbing themselves through continuously watching wall-sized televisions, sometimes on all four walls, and wearing ear pieces that cut themselves off from human contact, it’s easy to see that Bradbury’s cautionary tale may be more relevant today than it was almost sixty years ago when it was published. Even though the government has banned books, it is important to remember the point Faber the displaced college professor makes when he alludes to the fact that people stopped reading prior to the ban. This did not come from the top-down but from the bottom-up. People stopped reading and using their imaginations of their own accord—a chilling thought as we think about what freedoms we willingly give up as a society only to come to regret those years later. Are we careening headlong to the culmination of this vision or are we close to being there already? How outlandish are ideas like those in the Pixar film Wall-E where humans experience life through a screen? Proof that Bradbury’s ideas not only have not gone away over the decades, they have intensified and isn’t that what true science fiction is supposed to do: make us think about the human condition by setting the action in a society that is so different from the present that it’s difficult to get defensive about it, yet it’s really commenting on the society that people are living in at that moment. Similar to Arthur Miller commenting on McCarthyism by setting The Crucible back in time during the Salem Witch Trials, Bradbury cuts to the core of the present by setting his story in the future. What is the role of imagination and free-thinking in our society? In our education? In our day-to-day relations to other people? In our consumption of “dumbed-down” factoids of information fed to us by the internet, the media and others with agendas? How much is purposely left out of the discourse? These are questions that need to be answered, not as a society but by each of us as an individual. Just as people stopped reading, and thinking and imagining in the world of Fahrenheit 451, people need to keep those ideas alive in their day-to-day existence. And isn’t this what theater is all about? Beyond the entertainment value, doesn’t good theater get us to think about the human condition? To examine our behaviors, values and thoughts by holding a mirror up to our own lives. And isn’t keeping ourselves aware and thinking and questioning instead of going with the popular flow, the antidote to the numbed-out, hollow and unhappy existence that Guy Montag finally comes to grips with in F451? A cautionary tale to be sure, but one that doesn’t have to come true. After all our destinies are up to each of us-the individual and not some larger body.
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