Chicago Sun Times November 12, 2006
Childhood memories for an eternity
By Mary Houlihan
Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror, written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was 12 and went and found a toy typewriter and wrote his first "novel."
--Ray Bradbury, from the introduction to the novel Dandelion Wine
In his many books, Ray Bradbury has traveled the world and beyond. But the one thing that has remained central to his life is his Midwest childhood spent in north suburban Waukegan. A youngster with a vivid imagination, he played Tarzan in the vast ravine near his home, frequented the local cinema, roamed through visiting carnivals and hung out at the Carnegie Library.
"These were the things at the center of my life," Bradbury said. "It was the beginning of everything."
Of course, Bradbury, 86, went on to become the prolific author of more than 30 books, including a handful of classics -- Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
He is one of the icons, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, who pioneered the science-fiction/fantasy genre. In addition to novels, he has written short stories, movie and television screenplays, essays, poetry and non-fiction books. He says he plans to "live forever" through his writing -- an idea of eternity forged during that idyllic Lake County childhood.
It all began on a summer day when Bradbury was 12. The carnival was in town, and Bradbury and his friends headed to the lakeshore see a curiosity named Mr. Electrico.
"He put his sword of electricity on my head and said 'Live Forever!' " Bradbury recalled. "My secret soul had to find a way to do this. Two months later, I got a toy typewriter and I began to write. I've written every single day since."
Bradbury got his education at the library, where he read the great books and short stories. He was influenced by Charles Dickens, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Sean O'Casey, Eudora Welty and Willa Cather.
"I would borrow 10 books, take them home and have them surround me like a fortress," Bradbury said.
And it was a Buck Rogers cartoon in the newspaper that ignited his fascination with science fiction and fantasy.
"I opened the newspaper and saw that single strip, and it projected me into the future," Bradbury said. "I never came back."
All those vivid childhood memories became the basis for Bradbury's 1946 children's novel Dandelion Wine, which the author also adapted for the stage.
The rarely produced play for young adults begins the inaugural season of the Chicago Children's Theatre, under the direction of About Face Theatre artistic director Eric Rosen.
Written when he was 37, "Dandelion Wine" is a series of charming vignettes strung together by the musings of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his 9-year-old brother, Tom. Through the summer of 1928, we meet the sometimes quirky inhabitants of Greentown, Ill., Bradbury's stand-in for Waukegan.
It is a warm, captivating novel, but there also is a sense of menace and sadness about it as the time continuum begins to shift between childhood and young adulthood. Douglas discovers he is "alive" just as he begins to deal with change in his life and the wounds and liberation that brings.
Bradbury's original stage script was nearly three hours long, with 32 characters. Rosen, with Bradbury's permission, edited the play down to a 70-minute version.
"I had never adapted anything like this before," Rosen admitted. "Adapting a script already adapted from other source material seemed an impossible task. It turned out to be the hardest thing I've ever done."
Rosen cut and rearranged while also creating a few songs out of lyrical material in the original play. It was like working on two projects at once: Adapting the form and spirit of the book into a play and at the same time honoring the kind of changes and limitations that Bradbury made in his own adaptation process.
"It was like playing a score on a piano with one hand and on a guitar with the other," Rosen said, laughing. During this difficult process, he learned that "Dandelion Wine" is about "how to reconcile our small lots as humans with the kind of huge, uncontrollable, magical nature of the real world."
Bradbury continues to believe life is both a mystery and a miracle: "We are the audience to all that goes on in this universe. Why have a universe unless we were put here to observe it all?"
And in his simple story of one meandering summer, Bradbury finds both mystery and miracle in a young boy's observations of an insular solar system of the Midwest. What message does he hope "Dandelion Wine" presses on today's children?
"I hope they simply walk out full of excitement and maybe discover they are alive too," Bradbury said, a youthful enthusiasm ringing in his voice. "If my play can do that for children, then I've done a great job."
© 2006 Chicago Sun Times