"Fahrenheit 451" at Quantum Dragon Theatre

Quantum Dragon photo by Morgan Finley King

Before slipping back into "real time," I want to write up a show we saw last weekend, in part because it's still playing this weekend and it's worth seeing, and it's also the first time I've written up a show from these guys, so it would be a shame to miss the opportunity.

I will add that Quantum Dragon Theatre is a niche player that is one of less than a handful of American theater companies that exist specifically to produce science fiction plays. You can see a lot of their back story in this article from early this year in the San Francisco Chronicle. As someone who spent a lot of his youth reading the likes of Ray Bradbury, Lester Del Rey, and Robert Heinlein (and who still seeks out good, meaty SF material), I truly appreciate having this theater company around.

The Play

OK, you probably know the book. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is one of the classics of the 20th century. What I didn't know until very recently is the Bradbury did a stage adaptation of the novel, and that's the script that Director Sam Tillis started with for this production.

I'm not even going to summarize this. If you don't know the story, that's all the more reason you should go see this play, because it truly is part of the American canon of the 20th century. Suffice it to say that firemen in this future scenario are no longer putting out fires, they are setting them, to burn books.

I will say, from the current day, the specter of burning books doesn't have quite the same relevance, since printed books are no longer the sole repository of much of human knowledge and culture. But the point about suppression of thought, art, and culture remains just as pertinent today as ever.

Bradbury's adaptation is (unsurprisingly) a pretty straightforward rendering of the basic story, trimmed down to a roughly two-hour run time. I'm not aware of Bradbury as a writer for the stage, but he did a lot of screen writing (among other things, he adapted the screenplay for Moby Dick, which resulted in a book many years later called Green Shadows, White Whale that I highly recommend--but I digress), so the fact that he created a workable stage adaptation is no surprise.

Casting this play is a pretty interesting endeavor, though. There are only a couple of big roles, a few supporting roles, and a number of minor bits that come in only at the end. But on the whole it's a satisfying adaptation.

The Production

Quantum Dragon is not a big, glitzy, high-budget affair. But truly, for most science fiction to work, you don't need fancy special effects and sets. This genre has always been about ideas and people, so as long as those come through, a minimalist approach should work well. If anything, this production tries to do a little too much. We could do with a bit less in the way of scenery changing, and just move on with the story. It works OK, and was probably more distracting for me because I was sitting right up front, but I would have been OK with leaving some things in place and just working around them.

The two key roles, Captain Beatty (Dorian Lockett) and Montag (Ron Chapman) are strong. Lockett, the only Equity actor in the cast, has the chops to pull off some of the longer speeches, and a physical presence that manages to dominate the scenes he is in. Chapman is steady and a bit ponderous as Montag, which works for a character so conflicted. Melanie Marshall and James Aaron Oh hold their own as the other firemen/paramedics, and Emily Corbo is remarkably expressive as Mildred, Montag's wife. Overall the acting is far better that I was expecting from a company of this size. And the ensemble that gathers at the end (many of whom have been doing stagehand duty) features some really terrific small roles.

I could quibble about a few of the directorial choices, and there are definitely issues with some of the specific elements of the story that don't quite translate into today's milieu, but all of that kind of misses the point. Science fiction virtually never relies of the specifics of the story: it's all metaphor, it's all about bigger ideas than the particular ones depicted.

Bottom Line

To say this is a story about book burning is to miss most of the point. Fahrenheit 451 is about ideas and culture and the persistence of those things in the face of efforts to suppress them. And that comes through, viscerally, in this production. My only issue with Quantum Dragon has been that their shows don't run very long (this one closes this coming weekend), so I often miss them because I can't free up a night during their runs. But I like what I've seen, and reports of their previous shows are very positive. So go see them, and take your other nerdy friends, too.

This is a story worth hearing, and produced in a manner well worth seeing. Go!