FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 24, 2019
Contact: David Lee | leeviday@gmail.com Kangagirl Productions/Margaret Nolan | Producer@kangagirl.com
“H20”
World premiere of three short stories
THE LAKE, PICASSO SUMMER and THE MILLION YEAR PICNIC – by Ray Bradbury
Conceived and performed by David Lee for the 2019 Orlando Fringe Festival
ORLANDO, Fla. (April 24, 2019) – “Ray Bradbury’s H20”, comprised of three short stories by award-winning writer Ray Bradbury– The Lake, Picasso Summer and The Million Year Picnic, will be performed together for the first time in a world premiere by David Lee. Lee is the recipient of The Orlando International Fringe Festival’s ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’, the Critic’s Choice Award for ‘Best Director’ (2017), ‘Best Solo Drama’ (2016) and ‘Best Male Performance’ (2015).
Ray Bradbury is the prolific author of hundreds of short stories, books and screenplays. His visionary, groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Each of the three stories features a body of water in a very poetic and surprisingly dramatic way. A mysterious death is revisited in a ghostly memory in THE LAKE, which was Bradbury’s first published short story. PICASSO SUMMER is set by the ocean in France with the celebrated and controversial painter from the title making a beautiful and haunting appearance. And THE MILLION YEAR PICNIC, from The Martian Chronicles, is centered around a family surviving the apocalypse on Earth by escaping to Mars where they travel by boat on a river searching for their new home.
“Bodies of water are used in the stories as metaphor for letting go and being reborn”, explains David Lee. “It’s also a subtle reminder of how short life can be and how eventually we all must return to where we once began.”
H2O by Ray Bradbury | Conceived and Performed by David Lee
Produced by Kangagirl Productions (www.kangagirl.com ) and Susan Turner
Sound Design by Tara Kromer
Graphic Design by Drew Sizemore
Six Performances in the YELLOW VENUE:
Wed, May 15- 8:00PM
Sat, May 18- 7:30PM
Sun, May 19- 2:15PM
Tues, May 21- 8:30PM
Fri, May 24- 10:45PM
Sun, May 26- 7:15PM
Tix: $12 | Info & Tix: www.orlandofringe.org
Background on the short stories:
The Lake was first published in the May 1944 edition of Weird Tales, and later in Bradbury’s collections Dark Carnival, The October Country, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury. It’s semi-autobiographical, based on an encounter that Bradbury had as a child. The story focuses on Harold and his recollection of a traumatic experience where a childhood sweetheart named Tally drowns in the lake where they played together. Her body was not found. He returns to his hometown as an adult with his new wife, Margaret, to revisit his childhood places. Though he doesn’t recognize anyone, he is filled with “echoes” of memories like “leaves stacked for autumn burning.” On their last day, he encounters a lifeguard while on a walk along the shores who has just recovered the corpse of a child from the lake revealed to be that of his beloved Tally. This transports him to the memory of the fateful day when they were building a sandcastle together, knowing it would eventually disintegrate with incoming waves. The Lake was written in two hours; Bradbury believed it was the finest story he’d ever written at that point in time. He later said that The Lake was a pivotal work, the story that made him realize he was a great writer and that gave him the confidence to continue. “When I finished the short story, I burst into tears. I realized that after ten years of writing, I’d finally written something beautiful.”
The Picasso Summer is a 1969 drama based upon his short story, In a Season of Calm, starring Albert Finney and Yvette Mimieux. The screenplay was written by Ray Bradbury using the pseudonym of “Douglas Spaulding.” The short story was first published in Playboy in 1956 and again in 1960 in A Medicine for Melancholy collection of Bradbury’s short stories. The story takes place when Picasso was creating his greatest masterpieces. George Smith, an American, is huge fan of Picasso’s art and discovers that the artist is visiting friends in the same small fishing town in France where he and his wife are vacationing. During a leisurely stroll along the beach, Smith sees a man drawing pictures in the sand with a stick. The drawings are obviously Picasso’s work, and, thus, Smith meets the artist face-to-face. He realizes that there would be no way to preserve the master’s art before they are destroyed by the incoming tide waves, so he walks back and forth along the drawings, memorizing every detail. He returns after sundown to have dinner with his wife and contemplate what he experienced. The title for this story is a line from Wordsworth’s well-known ode, “Intimations of Immortality,” in which he uses water imagery to describe the concept of immortality.
The Million-Year Picnic was first published in Planet Stories in the summer of 1946. This is the final story in Ray Bradbury’s short story collection, The Martian Chronicles. Throughout the collection, people have moved away from Earth to begin anew on Mars. Some attempts have been more successful than others, and at the end of this story we do not know how the Minnesota family will bode on Mars. A family saves a rocket that the government would have used in the nuclear war and leaves Earth on a “fishing trip” to Mars. The family picks a city to live in and call home, destroying the rocket so that they cannot return to Earth. He offers his sons a gift in the form of their new world and introduces them to the new Martians.
THE LAKE ©1944, renewed 1972, THE MILLION YEAR PICNIC ©1946, renewed 1974, and IN THE SEASON OF CALM WEATHER ©1956, renewed 1984 by Ray Bradbury. Performed by permission of Ray Bradbury Literary Works, LLC and Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
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