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Classic time travel adventure ushers in new century EUREKA -- The turning of centuries has always stirred curiosity about what may lie ahead, but people living at the end of the 19th may have been the first to realize that the future could be almost unimaginably different from the past. Thinkers and writers of that era produced projections, predictions and just plain adventure tales predicated on the wonderful new technologies and social developments they imagined the new century and the more distant future might bring. The Pacific Art
Center Theatre will salute the end of the 20th Century on
Saturday with the premier performance of an original
adaptation of one of the best-known of these seminal science
fiction stories. In "The Traveller," North Coast actor,
director and playwright James Floss has turned H.G. Wells'
novel "The Time Machine" into a brilliant one-man stage play
that succeeds in capturing both the late-Victorian flavor of
Wells' language and the exciting immediacy of his story. |
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"Fortunately, the novel is written as a first-person narrative," Floss said. "That eased the task of turning it into a play. The performer can relate his adventures, just as Wells' protagonist does. I didn't have to change his wording or add anything -- mostly just pare it down some in places where Wells got a bit verbose." Wells was a friend of George Bernard Shaw and his colleague in the Fabian Society, which fought for such "socialistic" reforms as child labor laws and public sanitation. His interest in the future focused less on new inventions than on the consequences for humanity of the social trends he saw -- especially a growing gulf between politically suppressed, economically submerged workers, and a wealthy, idle, leisure class. His Traveller has invented a time machine, a bicycle-like contraption on which he journeys to the far-distant future of the 802nd millennium A.D. Here he finds a seeming utopia peopled by lovely, child-like creatures, the distant descendants of the human race. They gambol all day in beautifully tended gardens and sleep in gleaming porcelain structures -- Wells' father owned a china shop -- in which fruit and perfectly prepared vegetables appear every day on the tables. But they do no work and are too sweetly simple even to wonder where their food and (scanty) raiment comes from. Needless to say, this apparent paradise turns out to conceal a horrifying secret. In his adaptation, Floss has preserved all the piquancy, pathos and spine-chilling suspense of the original, while having subtle fun with some of its author's Victorian prejudices and preconceptions. The show will be staged in the Plays-in-Progress performance space, above the Lost Coast Brewery and Cafe at 617 Fourth St. The world premier performance on Saturday will be a champagne gala, with wine and hors d'ouvres served starting at 6 p.m. Tickets to the gala, of which a few are still available, are $25, or two for $40. "The Traveller" will play Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. until Jan. 29, with a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee on Jan. 16. Tickets are $8 general and $6 students and seniors, except for the "Cheap Thursday" bargain night on Jan. 27, when all are $5. For reservations, call 442-1533.
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