Daring Makes It So

For such a grim play, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which books burn) has a delightful and witty finish with Tolstoy and Aristotle and Dostoevsky and Lewis Carroll and Emily Bronte and others milling about, and shaking hands with each other in some woodsy retreat. “Call me Ishmael,” Melville says, introducing himself to Poe, a newcomer. These readers have escaped to “tell and remember books,” to memorize great works, preserving them like Irish monks in a shattered world. Bradbury wrote the novel (from which the film and, later, the play derived) in the early 1950s, setting it for 40 years hence. The play opens in a city where firemen burn books. Millay on Monday. Faulkner on Friday. And so on. There are no children, no schools, no safe places to walk, no lights, no news, no long chatty evenings. And no books. Books are about knowledge; and as Beatty the fire chief (Andrew Joffe) says, “There is nothing worth knowing.” Fire, we are told, fire is the answer to everything. Fire, and pills, and alcohol, and marathon sports coverage, and reality shows and 20-second news briefs on walls and walls of television in everyone’s home (keep in mind this was written 50-plus years ago). And then there is Beatty’s never-seen killing machine, the hellhound he names Baskerville. “He runs in beauty like the night,” Beatty says — risking riffs on Conan Doyle and Lord Byron. Director Thomas Gruenewald and his cast have made very exciting theater out of a very talky play. It is Beatty who delivers Bradbury’s complaints about crummy literature, news with no substance, poisoned English, mangled grammar and life without substance or philosophy. And he delivers a discomfitting account of how minorities (and he lists many, from blacks and women to second-generation Chinese) have wrung the controversy and sting out of literature leaving us with gossip, sex and comic books (and Texas edition school texts, Bradbury might have added). Those who do not aim for this Norman Rockwell world are expelled, he is saying, leaving pap for the rest. Joffe, irresolute, even diffident in roles at Aglet Theatre, makes a striking character of Beatty: furious, sometimes sly and always riveting. He steals the whole works from Montag (Christopher Vecchia) a young fireman who carries Bradbury’s novel and film. Montag starts questioning his life when he meets Clarisse (Alexandra Lincoln). She drinks rainwater as it falls from the sky and lives in a house with lights and stays up late to talk and asks questions. Clearly a subversive, and subversives disappear. She is in danger. And Montag, moved and awake, is too. With sirens whining, planes overhead, the snorting, bone-cracking hound, and terrific lighting, Gruenewald and his actors have created an eerie awful world in New Stage’s upstairs theater in Pittsfield. A world, Bradbury says, in true sci-fi tradition, that we can work our way out of. If we escape. And if we dare. “Fahrenheit 451,” directed by Thomas Gruenewald, with Sam Craig, Eric Cicchetti, Andrew Joffe, Alexandra Lincoln, Kristine Waterman, Gail Ryan, Mary Therese Valleri and Jeffrey Kent, runs at the New Stage Performing Arts Center, 55 North St. in Pittsfield, MA, through April 17. Tickets: 413-418-0999.