Ray Bradbury Performance Recalls Author's Reaction To Comic Burnings

Once upon a time, when Americans burned their comic books, a young Ray Bradbury fought back with his typewriter...and a story about a living corpse.

"Ray Bradbury's Pillar Of Fire," a 50-minute theatrical reading by actor Bill Oberst Jr. from Bradbury's 1948 novella, has performances on June 11, 18 and 25 at 8:00pm at Hollywood's Hudson Theatre (6539 Santa Monica Blvd). Tickets are available online at www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2496 and at www.plays411.com/ray.

Pillar Of Fire is set in the year 2349 on an Earth cleansed of all superstition. Halloween, dark literature and burials are banned. Bodies are burned without ceremony in massive fire towers; the ashes of the forgotten dead blown into the wind. As Bradbury's tale opens, the last graveyard on the planet is nearly emptied when the last dead man in the world wakes up. William Lantry is a 400 year-old walking corpse filled with hatred for this sterile world's disdain of things that go bump in the literary night. Bradbury wrote the story in 1948 as EC Comics like Tales From The Crypt were being thrown into bonfires after a psychiatrist attacked them as morally corrupt in a best-selling book.

Five years later Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451.

When Bradbury passed away he left behind millions of what he called "my bastard children;" adults who first read him in school. Oberst says he is one of them. "He saved my childhood. This is that boy's way of saying thank you all these years later." Oberst got the idea after performing in Bradbury's boyhood hometown of Waukegan, IL at a Halloween tribute the year the author died. He says he hopes to tour libraries with

Pillar Of Fire and other Bradbury stories. "Vincent Price used to tour with Poe's works" says the actor, "I'd like to do the same with Bradbury. Not that he needs my little efforts to be read and to be remembered - wherever there is imagination, there will always be Ray Bradbury."

Photo Credit: Pillar of Fire Poster