Smarthome appliances may only have gained widespread popularity in the 2010s, but Ray Bradbury was predicting them in 1950, with his short story “The Veldt.”
Now, 33-year-old theater company Word for Word is juxtaposing that uncannily prescient text, in which parents in a “Happylife Home” confront some overzealous high-tech in their nursery, with another before-its-time short story: Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Big Space F—.”
That 1972 work extends the metaphor of the rocketship as phallus, with the nose of the vessel full of freeze-dried semen.
Like Bradbury’s piece, this one’s set in the future, but there’s no surface cheer. All that’s left of Earth is “s— and beer cans and old automobiles and Clorox bottles.” The space mission’s goal is to find a new, clean home in the Andromeda Galaxy for our species to reproduce. Call it Elon Musk’s fantasy, but from back when such a depiction would still be satire.
Delia MacDougall directs the double bill — dubbed “Absolutely Science Fiction!” — using Word for Word’s unique method of transposing prose to the stage without eliding a single word of its source material.
