Twice this fall — on the nights of Oct. 3 and 4 — I am going to put on a captain’s uniform, walk out onto the stage of the Holland Theatre, and burn books in front of my neighbors. I have been looking forward to it for months. What I did not expect, when we started rehearsing, was that a story Ray Bradbury published in 1953 would begin to read like something out of this year’s news.

Windmill Productions brings “Fahrenheit 451” to the Holland for two nights, directed by Kris Swisher with Mark Amidon assistant-directing and doubling onstage as Aristotle, and it is a big, strange, wonderful undertaking. 

Evan Cook plays Montag, the fireman who starts to doubt the fire. Ashlyn Taylor is Faber, Maria Stolly is Clarissa, Anita Craig is Mildred. And then there is the part of the company I love most — the actors who step onstage as the books themselves, from Larry Novak’s Melville to Joy McCarren’s Tolkien to Don Corwin’s Wilde, and a long shelf of others besides. 

In Bradbury’s story, after the world has burned its libraries, a scattered handful of people save literature the only way left to them: each one memorizes a single book, until the person becomes the book. Windmill puts those living books on their feet in front of you. You get to watch the authors walk.

I play Captain Beatty, the man who lights the matches. He is the villain, and he is the hardest and most interesting role I have ever tried to carry, because Bradbury….. READ MORE…