Ray Bradbury’s Pillar Of Fire:

Emmy-Winning Actor Breathes Gravedust In Solo Performance

(Los Angeles, CA) When Americans burned comic books, a young Ray Bradbury fought back with his typewriter, and a story about a living dead man. Ray Bradbury’s Pillar Of Fire, a 50-minute dramaized theatrical reading from Bradbury’s 1948 novella by Emmy Award-winning film and TV actor Bill Oberst Jr. (Criminal Minds) is on tour for sold-out
runs in Los Angeles and on New York’s Theatre Row. The performance won awards in both Los Angeles and New York.

Pillar Of Fire is set in the year 2349 on an Earth cleansed of all dead things. Halloween, dark literature and even burials are banned. As Bradbury’s tale opens, the last graveyard on the planet is nearly emptied when the last dead man in the world wakes up. Bradbury wrote the story while comics like Tales From The Crypt were being thrown into bonfires
after a psychiatrist attacked them as morally corrupt in testimony to Congress and in a best-selling book. Five years later Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. He often told interviewers “Pillar Of Fire was my rehearsal for Fahrenheit 451.”
Oberst has performed Ray Bradbury’s Pillar Of Fire as an Audible audiobook, on college campuses, in theatres, in basements; “everytime I get a chance,” said the actor. A veteran of some 200 horror film and TV projects, Oberst said he took inspiration from a fellow “gentleman of horror,” Vincent Price, who toured with readings of works by Poe. “The
taproot of horror is in literature” he said. “This piece is dark, poetic, angry, funny and heartbreaking. You can’t get this on a screen. It’s magic. It’s the magic of Bradbury.” (Pillar of Fire is read with the permission of Don Congdon Associates,Inc. on behalf of Ray Bradbury Enterprises, Inc. Copyright 1948 Love Romances, Inc.)