George Orwell’s “1984”: The Play | The Booksmith

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The Booksmith presents a taste of the stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 with playwright and actor Michael Gene Sullivan and others performing Act One at 7:30 pm on Monday, July 22, 2013.

The LA Weekly wrote, “We forget that what made 1984 frightening at the time of its publication was not Orwell’s far-fetched prediction of a totalitarian elite forever frozen into power. It terrified because it presumed to describe 1948 – the year of the book’s writing – as though it were ancient, inalterable history. Even still, so much of Orwell’s vision of the political future, from the strangulation of language to the end of privacy, has come to pass, though mostly with our hearty consent.

By far the most disturbing parallel has been our game acceptance of never-ending war and expedient torture – we seem to be thoroughly at peace with these concepts as long as we have enough creature comforts. Today, opinion polls show that Americans demand that there be more public surveillance cameras and are quite agreeable to having their reading and entertainment habits monitored by police agencies. (We don’t mind having our phones tapped, so long as we have a choice of downloadable ring tones.) It may be argued that Orwell erred by not predicting our lusty embrace of a life of reduced freedoms, but perhaps not even he was pessimistic enough to believe in such a sad possibility.”

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