Title: Ray Bradbury's To the Chicago abyss
Description: Bradbury explained his intentions in connection with this play as a protest against great thinkers with great ideas demanding absolute excellence. He sets it "in the bleakness of the future as an old man remembers the little pleasures of yesterday." He suggests, "If we took all the junk out of life our juices would dry up, the sap would go dead in the trees and we'd occupy an intellectual graveyard where we'd read each other's headstones." In the play, in a place like a bombed-out city, an old man encounters a young punk whose hostility turns to tears as now-forbidden little enjoyments are remembered. Out of this the old man is given his ticket "to the Chicago abyss" where such things can still be part of life. One ext. set. (www.playdatabase.com)
Subjects: post-apocalypse, memory, nostalgia
Places: Chicago
Time periods: Future