Ryan Tasker and Nicole Odell Photo by Jessica Palopoli

For their most recent production, Word for Word (in conjunction with Z Space) has chosen to stage two stories on a single night, in an evening entitled Absolutely Science Fiction!: Stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. The company usually stages only one story at a time, and I wish they had stuck to that this time, as well.

The evening started off promisingly with a terrific take on one of Ray Bradbury's most well-known short stories, "The Veldt." "The Veldt," (which was published in 1950 in the Saturday Evening Post under the title "The World the Children Made") takes place in a futuristic home that does virtually everything for its occupants: cooks their meals, bathes them, shuttles them from room to room via air tubes, rocks them to sleep, and even ties their shoes. Because of this, wife Lydia is beginning to "feel unnecessary" by all the automation of their "Happylife Home": "I feel like I don't belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid," she says.

Concern about the house has arisen because the children are spending an inordinate amount of time in the Nursery, which is a virtual reality room rather like the Holodeck in the Star Trek universe. The Nursery conjures up any place or any thing the people inside it imagine. Lately, though, it's been creating an African Veldt, complete with a pride of lions who are constantly either hunting, feeding, or visiting the water hole. When Lydia and her husband George step into the room, they feel oppressed by the African sun and threatened by the lions, who seem to eye them hungrily. But when they determine to shut the room down and take a vacation from technology, the children, Wendy and Peter, throw massive tantrums, and the parents grant them one last visit to the veldt. Bad move. Just as the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't like the idea of being unplugged by Dave, George rightly thinks, "I don't imagine the room will like being shut off."

The action all takes place on a set by Kate Boyd featuring a simple facade of a home upstage and pillars arrayed at stage left and stage right. These pillars get gradually shorter the farther upstage they are, creating the sense of a journey on an endless road. There are lovely bits of theatrical imagination on display here, including a table where food magically appears (though the magic is really just a hidden cast member carefully raising the plates to table level) and the simple projection of a green border around the door to the Nursery when it's open, and a red border when it's locked.

The five actors–Christian Jimenez, Hannah Mae Sturges, Joel Mullennix, Nicole Odell and Ryan Tasker–enjoy playing this melodrama with all the snarkiness that is subtextual in Bradbury's text. Though they sometimes verge on overplaying their roles, their performances also somehow seem right in tune with post-war optimism blended with contemporary over-reliance on technology.

After intermission, the same cast dive into Kurt Vonnegut's "The Big Space Fuck." Written in 1972, the story addresses issues of overpopulation and pollution, which Word for Word emphasize by projecting images of smog-spewing smokestacks and piles of garbage onto the facade upstage. The title refers to an effort by the United States to make "a serious effort to make sure that human life would continue to exist somewhere in the universe, since it certainly couldn't continue much longer on Earth."

The plan, such as it is, was to shoot a rocket loaded with 800 pounds of freeze-dried jizzum (as Vonnegut spells it in his story) and send it two million light years away to the Andromeda Galaxy. How this will solve humanity's problems is a mystery, but my guess is Vonnegut meant it to be a commentary on the need for politicians to appear to be doing something without actually accomplishing anything.

Meanwhile, on a polluted Earth, laws had changed such that children, once they had reached adulthood, could sue their parents for the "serious mistakes they'd made" in raising their children, which the couple at the heart of the story, Grace and Dwayne Hoobler (Hannah Mae Sturges and Christian Jimenez), discover when their daughter, Wanda June (Nicole Odell), files a complaint against them. Meanwhile, Senator Flem Snopes of Mississippi (Joel Mullennix) had been flogging The Big Space Fuck and wearing a codpiece (all the rage in Vonnegut's future) shaped like a rocket with the confederate flag on its side.

Vonnegut claims "The Big Space Fuck" was his dirtiest story ever, and it's certainly filled with profanity. It's also a rather prophetic story, at least in terms of political discourse, for as it states: "This was a period of great permissiveness in matters of language, so even the President was saying shit and fuck and so on, without anybody's feeling threatened or taking offense." Vonnegut, who died before Trump's ascendence, would not be shocked by his rise to power.

Unfortunately, the story seems like it plays second fiddle to Bradbury's. The set, which worked so well for "The Veldt" seems out of place in the setting of "The Big Space Fuck." The actors maintain the same melodramatic overacting that works well with Bradbury's text, but seems oddly unaligned with Vonnegut's; a little restraint might help illustrate the rather ludicrous nature of "The Big Space Fuck." Ultimately, I got the feeling director Delia McDougall spent far more of her time working out how to stage "The Veldt," leaving "The Big Space Fuck" to fend for itself.

Word for Word's Absolutely Science Fiction!: Stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut runs through July 19, 2026, at Z Below, 450 Florida Street, San Francisco CA. Performances are Wednesdays-Thursdays at 7:00 p.m., Fridays-Saturdays at 8:00 p.m., and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. There is no show on July 4, but an extra matinee Saturday 7/11 at 2pm. Tickets are $50-$75. For tickets and information, please visit ZSpace.org or call 415-626-0453.