The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
and other plays for today, tomorrow, and beyond tomorrow
By Ray Bradbury
Also by Ray Bradbury
The Machineries of Joy
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Golden Apples of the Sun
Dandelion Wine
The October Country
Fahrenheit 451
The Illustrated Man
The Silver Locusts
The Day It Rained Forever
I Sing the Body Electric!
S is for Space
R is for Rocket
Hart-Davis, MacGibbon London
Granada Publishing Limited
First published in Great Britain 1973 by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd
3 Upper James Street London W1R 4BP and
Frogmore St Albans Hertfordshire AL2 2NF
Copyright (c) 1972 by Ray Bradbury
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
ISBN 0 246 10567 4 Printed in Great Britain by Fletcher & Son Ltd, Norwich
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
With Notes on Staging
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
The Veldt
To the Chicago Abyss
HERE, THEN, ARE THE FIRST THREE PLAYS I WROTE FOR MY PANDEMONIUM THEATRE COMPANY.
Why such a company name? Because it pleased and delighted me. Because it was an unexpected and frivolous name to give a company of glad fools. And because it meant when you came into our theatre, you never knew what special kind of hell might break loose.
Ray Bradbury
INTRODUCTION
With Notes on Staging
First things first. This book is dedicated to Charles Rome Smith, who has directed all of my work for the theater so far, and who will, God allowing, direct more in the years ahead.
As for myself, I began with the theater and I shall probably end with it. I have not, up to now, made a penny, nickel or dime at it, but my love is constant and, in best cliche fashion, its own reward. It has to be. For no one stands about in the alleys after a show giving doughnut money to crazy playwrights.
My first dream in life was to become a magician. Blackstone summoned me up on stage when I was ten to help him with various illusions. I assisted in vanishing a bird in its cage, and helped stir a rabbit out of a strange omelet. Blackstone gave me the rabbit, which I carried home in happy hysterics. Named Tillie, the rabbit in short order produced six more rabbits and I was off and running as an illusionist.
At twelve I was singing leads in school operettas. At twelve and one-half, in Tucson, Arizona, I announced to my classmates that within two weeks I would be an actor broadcasting from local Radio Station KGAR. Self-propelled by my own infernal brass, I trotted over to the station, hung about emptying ashtrays, running for cokes, and being happily underfoot. Rather than drown me with a batch of kittens, the station gave up and hired me to read the Sunday comics to the kiddies every Saturday night. My pay was free tickets to the local theaters to see The Mummy and King Kong. I was undoubtedly overpaid.
In high school I wrote the Annual Student Talent Show. At nineteen I belonged to Laraine Day’s Wilshire Players Guild in a Mormon Church only a block from my home in Los Angeles. For Laraine, who was becoming a big star at MGM in those days in such films as My Son, My Son, I wrote a number of three-act plays that were so incredibly bad no one in the Guild dared tell me of my absolute lack of talent.
Nevertheless, I sensed my own mediocrity and quit play-writing. I vowed never to return to the theater for twenty years, until I had seen and read most of the plays of our time. I lived up to that vow. Only in my late thirties, with thousands of seen performances in my blood, did I dare to try my hand at theater work again.
Even then, licking my old wounds, I feared to let my plays fall into the hands of directors and actors. I seriously doubted my ability, and probably would have delayed additional years had not a friend, hearing of my one-act Irish plays, invited me over to his house one night for a reading. My work was read aloud by actors James Whitmore and Strother Martin. By the end of the evening, we were all on the floor, laughing. Suddenly I realized that the older Bradbury was at long last ready for the theater again.
The theater, however, was not ready for me.
I could find no group, no director, no actor, no banker, prepared to put my plays on a stage.
Only in 1963, when Charles Rome Smith and I fell into each others arms, did I begin to think of producing the plays, myself.
Now this, in itself, is extraordinary. In the entire history of the American theater, only a handful of playwrights have been brash enough, and dumb enough, to save their money and invest it in their own plays.
I talked it over with my wife, told her I thought the plays were more than good, that all the producers were wrong, as well as the bankers, and that I had to try, just once, to see whether or not I was the grandest fool of all.
We saved our money for a year, rented the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, finished three one-act plays, hired Charles Rome Smith to direct, and began casting.
The evening of one acts titled The World of Ray Bradbury, opened in October, 1964. The reviews were all, I repeat all, excellent. If I had written them myself they couldn’t have been better.
The World ran twenty weeks, after which we opened The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit for a run of twenty-four weeks, again to incredibly fine notices.
We took The World of Ray Bradbury to New York in 1965 where, with inferior casting and a dreary theater in a bad section of the Bowery, plus a newspaper strike which insured our nonexistence, we folded within three nights, to the tune of $40,000 and thirty-five belated and truly bad reviews, published after our closing, when the newspapers rushed back on the scene to give us a dark burial.
I took the slow train home, vowing to stay away from New York for another lifetime. So far, producers and directors in New York appear to feel the same way; I have not been invited East since.
What did I learn from these experiences?
That working with your own group, your own theater, your own director, your own actors, your own money, is best.
Working with an outside producer and outside money, one is constantly victimized by worries over losing their investment or toadying to their taste and will.
Working as your own producer, all the fun that should be in the theater comes to the surface. I have rarely had such a glorious time in my life. I dearly loved being with my actors and my director. I enjoyed the challenge of casting. I wrote most of the publicity for the theater myself, helped design the advertising, clean out the restrooms, and, finally, take the losses without a sigh or remorseful tear. Strange to report, losing one’s own money doesn’t hurt at all. Losing other people’s money is, for me, anyway, a dreadful experience, one I hope to suffer rarely in a lifetime.
What else did I learn? To trust my own intuitive judgment and taste. Let me give you an example:
My director called me in the midst of rehearsals of To the Chicago Abyss. The actors, he cried, are in rebellion. The play won’t work they say. Chaos. Tell everyone to hold still, sit down, I’ll be right there, I said. I grabbed a taxi and made it to the theater in ten minutes. Okay, I said, everyone on stage, run through the play!
The actors, grumbling, did the play.
When it was over I gave one hell of a yell.
Good grief, you’re terrific! I said. You know what’s wrong with you? You’re all exhausted. You’ve been
in rehearsal four weeks and you don’t know which end is up. Let me tell you: this play is the best play of the three we’re putting on. It’s the play that will get the best notices. In this play, you will get the critical shouts of joy.
I was right of course, and my actors were wrong.
The day after our opening, the reviews mentioned To the Chicago Abyss above all the other plays. Harold Gould, our principal actor, got raves for his performance as the Old Man Who Remembered Mediocrities.
I guess what I’m saying here is, if you don’t have taste, if you don’t trust your intuition, if you don’t believe in your plays and their ideas to start with, you shouldn’t be in the theater. But if you do make the move, make it on your own, save up your money, it doesn’t have to be a large amount, rent a warehouse, nail together a ramshackle stage, and do the damned play! I have spent as little as $49.50 producing one of my plays at a storefront theater in Los Angeles. At other times I have spent $200 and then again $20,000, which went into our final production of The World of R.B.
For what other reasons did I come back to the theater after almost twenty years away?
Because most of the plays I saw or read in those twenty years had no ideas in them.
Because most of the plays I saw or read had no language, no poetry in them.
I could not then, I cannot now, accept a theater that is devoid of ideas and poetry.
It seemed shocking to me that a country that has been built on ideas, both political and technological, a country that has influenced the entire world with its concepts and three-dimensional extrusions of those concepts in robot forms, would be so singularly lacking in the theater of ideas.
I have always thought that Bernard Shaw deserved to be the patron saint of the American theater. Yet I saw little of his influence here, a true playwright of ideas born to set the world right. Avant-garde in 1900, he remains light years ahead of our entire avant-garde today.
My other saint would be Shakespeare, of course; and I saw none of his best influence at work in our theater arts.
They say that novelists write the books they wish they could find in libraries.
I set out to write the plays I did not see on the American stage. Shaw? No. Shakespeare? Hardly. Yet if one’s influences are not great and broad and wondrous, one has nowhere to start and nowhere to go. These fine ghosts were my instructors, my good company, my friends.
I rediscovered them through Charles Laughton.
In 1955, Charles Laughton and Paul Gregory asked me to adapt my novel Fahrenheit 451 to the stage. I came up with a bad play. Laughton and Gregory gave me drinks one night at sunset and told me just how bad, but told me kindly. A few months later, Charlie had me up to his house. He stood on his hearth and began to talk about theater, about Moliere, about the Restoration playwrights, but particularly about Shaw and then Shakespeare.
As he talked, his house filled with pageantry. The flagstones of his fireplace knew the print of horses and the cry of mobs. The theater of Shakespeare pulsed out of Charlie with great clarity and beauty. He taught me about language all over again.
In the following years I would often go over to swim on summer afternoons when Charlie was preparing to direct or appear in Major Barbara, The Apple Cart, or, at Stratford-on-Avon, King Lear. Charlie would float enormously about his pool, glad for my company, for I was silent, and he loved to talk theater and work out his ideas on character and style on anyone who had the good sense to listen.
It was the best school I ever had, and the best teacher.
I have not forgotten dear Charles Laughton’s lessons.
Anything of mine you see on stage in the coming years will be touched by Charlie’s presence. And, just at his elbow, Blackstone.
Their shared theater magic is very similar. What Laughton accomplished with language, Blackstone accomplished with conniption-fit machineries and illusory contraptions.
The two come together and fuse in my science-fiction plays The Veldt and To the Chicago Abyss.
Science fiction is what happened to magic when it passed through the hands of the alchemists and became future history. Somewhere along the line we changed caps, labels, and became more practical, but the effect is the same. Television is no less magical for being capable of explanation. I still don’t believe it works. Airplanes don’t fly; the laws are all wrong.
Our modern technologies, then, are the equivalents of old astrological frauds, alchemical lies, and the nightmares of prehistory. We must build the old terrors up in metal forms and steam them to stranger destinations, first in our psyches, and very soon after in three dimensions, two of which are more often than not surprise and horror. The third is, of course, delight. We wouldn’t build these immense toys if we didn’t dearly love to wind them up and let them run to Doom’s End or Eternal Life, sometimes one, sometimes t’other.
I wrote The Veldt because my subconscious knew more about children than has often been told. It began as a word-association test, the sort of thing I often do mornings when I go from bed to my typewriter and let anything jump out on the page that wishes to jump. I wrote the word “nursery” on a piece of paper. I thought to myself, Past? No, Present? No, Future? Yes! A nursery in the future, what would it be like? Two hours later the lions were feeding on the far veldt in the last light of day, the work was done, I wrote Finis and stopped.
To the Chicago Abyss was written because sociologists, amateur and professional psychologists, and grand intellectual thinkers bore, distract, or irritate me to madness. I do not believe, and never have believed, that mediocrities hurt people. I have loved all the mass media, looked down on by the intelligentsia, as I grew up. I wanted to do a play about a man who could not recall great quality but only quantity, and that of such dumb stuffs as to be beneath consideration. The boy in me remembered Clark Bars and their bright circus wrappings, and I was off!
To the Chicago Abyss was written long years before Pop Art came on the scene. The story and the play proved to be more than a little prophetic. Since that time, also, motion pictures, once disdained, have been discovered to be an art form. Where was everyone forty years ago? How come I knew it when I was ten? To the Chicago Abyss says: Enjoy! If we took all of the junk out of life, our juices would dry up, the sap would go dead in the trees, we would occupy an intellectual graveyard and read each other’s headstones.
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit came out of my experiences as a child and young man in Roswell, New Mexico, Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles. I grew up with many boys of mixed Mexican-American blood. My best friend at junior high school was a boy named Eddie Barrera. When I was twenty-one I lived in and around a tenement at the corner of Figueroa Street and Temple in L.A., where, for five years, I saw my friends coming and going from Mexico City, Laredo, and Juarez. Their poverty and mine were identical. I knew what a suit could mean to them. I saw them share clothes, as I did with my father and brother. I remembered graduating from Los Angeles High School wearing a hand-me-down suit in which one of my uncles had been killed by a holdup man. There was a bullet hole in the front and one going out the back of the suit. My family was on government relief when I graduated. What else, then, but wear the suit, bullet holes and all?
So much for the genesis of these plays. Now, how does one produce them?
As simply as possible.
Let the Shakespearean and Oriental theater teach you. Little scenery, few props, and an immense enthusiasm for myth, metaphor, language to win the day.
In a science-fiction play, the harder you try to create the world of the future, the worse your failure. Simplicity was the keynote for our sets and costumes. In The Veldt, the various living areas of the future house were denned by nothing more than complex geometric patterns of bright nylon and other synthetic threads. The house looked very much like a fragile tapestry works. You could easily see through all the walls. The main door leading into the playroom-nursery was a spider-web like device which could expand or contract when pulled or released by other bright twine
s. Another minor psychological factor might be mentioned here; your average scrim, utilized in thousands of plays over the years, comes between your actors and the audience as an irritating obstruction. Our use of bright threads and twines was a good discovery. The audience never felt kept off, away, or obstructed, yet the feeling of a wall was there when we needed it.
When I first wrote The Veldt as a play, I had intended to project actual films of lions on a vast screen. This would have been an error of such immensity I can hardly believe I once entertained the idea.
Instead, I fell back on the lessons so amiably taught me by friend Laughton: stand in the center of the stage and create with words that world, these concepts, those carnivorous beasts.
The audience, then, was to become the veldt, and the sun-blazed lions. When in the playroom, my actors stared out and around in the wilderness that the audience became. This approach worked splendidly.
It worked also because we used sound tapes broadcast from the four corners of the auditorium. This allowed us to prowl the lion roars in circles around about and behind the audience, always keeping them a bit off-balance, never knowing where the sound of the lions might rise again in the long grass.
So I rediscovered an ancient fact. A well-written, well-spoken line creates more images than all the movies of the world. The Chinese were wrong. One word is worth a thousand pictures.
There are more than forty-two sound cues in The Veldt, and as many or more light cues.
This means you must find a stage manager, a lighting man, and a sound man of absolutely sterling quality, not liable to panics. The slightest error can throw The Veldt off-balance, drive the actors out of their minds, and send the director off to the nearest pub for the rest of the night.
Therefore, the technical rehearsals on The Veldt must be exhausting. This means staying up long after midnight in the final days before your opening to make sure that sound, light, and actors function as one whole. Your actors must sense each sound and light cue with hairline accuracy, so as to be able to relax and react truly to Africa “out beyond,” hidden among the paying customers.
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