The eerily prescient, laugh-out-loud funny new show Absolutely Science Fiction! is bringing two short stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut to life at Z Space.
It’s the latest production from Word for Word, a performing arts company founded at the Mission-Potrero theater in 1993 with the unusual mission to stage not plays but narrative fiction (i.e., novels and short stories).
A scene from Vonnegut's "The Big Space Fuck" at Z Space(Jessica Palopoli)
“We don’t change the text at all,” says co-artistic director and co-founder Joanne Winter. That means that, in order to stay true to the author’s original intention, the company has to find a way to integrate all of the story’s narration into the dialogue of its characters.
In a previous Word for Word production of several chapters of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, for example, they had to come up with a way for the actors to deliver the text’s long descriptions of canning machinery—a problem they solved by having the actors actually become the machinery.
“It becomes choreographic sometimes,” Winters continues. “It’s a combination of, like, ballet, and a symphony, and a chorus, and theater all at once because you’re trying to save that one voice of the author by doing it in many voices.”
A scene from Bradbury's "The Veldt" at Z Space(Jessica Palopoli)
Indeed, movement—quick exits, entrances, costume changes, and the creative use of props—is key to the flow of the two stories in the current production, Absolutely Science Fiction!, which runs through July 19th. The production’s first story, “The Veldt,” written by Ray Bradbury in 1950, is a horror tale of sorts about a family living inside a futuristic home. The house does everything for them, from cooking their food to tying their shoes to caring for their children. But when the kids get addicted to producing dark and deadly imagery in their virtual reality nursery, mom and dad realize the consequences of outsourcing their parenting to a machine.
The second story, “The Big Space Fuck,” written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1972, is an irreverent takedown of a not-too-distant future American society that has destroyed Earth’s ecosystem and sentenced themselves to extinction. The only way to save humanity, according to the U.S. government? Send a rocket full of sperm to the Andromeda Galaxy and hope for the best.
The way the cast of five dexterously jumps from dialogue to narration on topics both laughably absurd and frighteningly familiar is genuinely brilliant. Though each individual must convincingly breathe life into multiple characters, they make their appearance on the stage feel natural, as if they’d always been waiting to break free from the prison of their pages.
A scene from Vonnegut's "The Big Space Fuck" at Z Space(Jessica Palopoli)
Just as significant is the way these two stories, written 76 and 54 years ago respectively, feel entirely relevant to the reality in which we find ourselves stuck today. Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut may not have predicted the future, exactly, but they somehow saw the writing on the wall before anyone else knew what was coming. It’s impossible not to see the parallels, Winters agrees, especially when it comes to AI.
“It’s so overwhelming and huge and confusing. Can we use it, do we want to use it, do we want to just banish it completely from our lives? Or is there a way to work intelligently with it? We don’t have any answers at this point but we want to keep the conversation going. That’s what good art does. It doesn’t provide answers but it helps you think about how you want to move forward in the world.”
// ‘Absolutely Science Fiction!’ plays at Z Space through July 19th; 450 Florida St. (Mission Potrero), get tickets at zspace.org
