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The Martian Chronicles Script
Drama. By Ray Bradbury.
Cast: Large, flexible. A young Martian asks another if there could be any life on Earth. "Impossible," is the answer. "There's too much oxygen!" However, an expedition from Earth has landed on Mars and is destroyed. The crew of a later rescue mission is committed to a Martian insane asylum for thinking themselves "Earth men." The involvements and interplay between the worlds and the opportunity for imaginative costumes and sets invite you, your actors and crew into a thrilling Bradbury adventure. Bare stage w/two scrims.
Cast: Large, flexible. A young Martian asks another if there could be any life on Earth. "Impossible," is the answer. "There's too much oxygen!" However, an expedition from Earth has landed on Mars and is destroyed. The crew of a later rescue mission is committed to a Martian insane asylum for thinking themselves "Earth men." The involvements and interplay between the worlds and the opportunity for imaginative costumes and sets invite you, your actors and crew into a thrilling Bradbury adventure. Bare stage w/two scrims.
86 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
3 people are currently reading
74 people want to read
About the author
Ray Bradbury
2,561 books25.2k followersRay Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 18, 2024
Exactly what you would expect from Bradbury: disturbing, reflective, timeless and timely all at once. Wonderful story and very good play; it’s just not right for us. Producing this play would be for me and not for the kids. That’s not what I’m about.
October 20, 2025
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, adapted for the BBC
As in his better known masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, the astounding Ray Bradbury offers a bleak, pessimistic- or is it realistic?- view of the future, wherein our planet would face catastrophic war, with the result that life on Mars might be not just better, but perhaps the only alternative.
The perspective that Mars represents the future is shared by some of the luminaries of this age, Elon Musk being one of the formidable entrepreneurs bent on developing the means to travel, land and colonize that planet.
In the future predicted in The Martian Chronicles, one first mission to the planet has been unsuccessful and another one lands on the Red Planet, without problems, but the crew finds soon that the first team was killed by the...Martians.
Not only was the planet inhabited- or should one say, will have been?- but looking at their achievements, the fantastic cities they will have built are "as nothing that humans ever constructed".
The man leading this mission is Captain Wilder- played by the wondrous Derek Jacobi- and in his team, one the one side we have Spender, a determined, obstinate woman and on the other, Parkhill and other, more brutal, unsophisticated, rude, perhaps even primitive members, coming from the military ranks.
Spender is soon aghast at what happens to this phenomenal Martian civilization, with splendid works, made of silver and other precious materials, with fantastic skill.
She is also disgusted, outraged by the behavior of the men that vomit, make all sorts of vicious noises and disrespect what they find on Mars, while the rebel woman is in awe, mesmerized by the lost culture, especially after she discovers that the cause of the extinction of the Martians is...chickenpox , brought in by humans.
She explains with what would prove prophetic accuracy to the captain that people from Earth would exploit the planet in the same irresponsible manner they did on Earth and hence she wants to prevent that.
She starts by killing members of her group and is facing the captain who tries to persuade her to give up- why cover this civilization she admires in blood? - and he has a point also when he says that, given that she killed comrades, she has lost the moral authority to preach about values, what other humans should do.
Spender is killed in the confrontation, the captain having had no other choice, but the prediction that the "money men" would be sent to this planet to take out the minerals and all that can be extracted comes true.
It can be argued that there is nothing wrong with using minerals, resources from Mars, only Ray Bradbury is correct in stating, through his characters, that mankind has abused planet Earth, in extracting oil, coal and everything else and then burning it , we have brought about Climate Change- denied by idiots like the Donald - which is endangering the world we live in and which looks like becoming uninhabitable for our descendents.
The Martian Chronicles deals with the stories of the crew, a couple of the colonists and some children who try to escape a dangerous, possibly dead Earth, in this adaptation for the BBC, Radio 4.
The colonists we learn about, have arrived on e planet to...sell chili dogs, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in the opinion of the woman, but close to where a lot of action would be, in the view of the man.
There are some creatures that appear and it is not clear what they are - vermin? It that is the answer, the male partner points out that they have to deal with it without letting anyone know about it, for rats or anything of the kind mean the death of a food business...
Furthermore, they have the Best Chili Dogs in the Galaxy!
The other story that is surely taking more space in the original material, and less in an abridged version, of only a little over fifty minutes, is that of Hathaway and his family.
He is saved and he brings the two members of this visiting team to his family, wife and two children, only there are very suspicious aspects about them.
The captain had known them and the wife is his age and looks too much younger and the children, who should be in their thirties, look like teenagers.
As one of the visitors pretends to need something from the spacecraft, he calls for more intelligence, using maybe some distant future version of Alexa or Siri and finds three mounds where the graves are.
He calls his partner out and they find the shed of this Martian, where they understand what happened:
He has lost his family years ago, probably killed by a virus, and he used his skills and the tools to recreate a...family.
Artificial Intelligence in the distant, or maybe near future.
Earth suffers from devastating war, the orders are to shoot any rocket and this covers a civilian craft which has children and a teacher on board.
Alhamdulillah, the captain disobeys this gruesome mission and the children arrive on the Red Planet.
Will they be the hope for a post apocalyptic mankind?
The Martians settled after Armageddon?
As in his better known masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, the astounding Ray Bradbury offers a bleak, pessimistic- or is it realistic?- view of the future, wherein our planet would face catastrophic war, with the result that life on Mars might be not just better, but perhaps the only alternative.
The perspective that Mars represents the future is shared by some of the luminaries of this age, Elon Musk being one of the formidable entrepreneurs bent on developing the means to travel, land and colonize that planet.
In the future predicted in The Martian Chronicles, one first mission to the planet has been unsuccessful and another one lands on the Red Planet, without problems, but the crew finds soon that the first team was killed by the...Martians.
Not only was the planet inhabited- or should one say, will have been?- but looking at their achievements, the fantastic cities they will have built are "as nothing that humans ever constructed".
The man leading this mission is Captain Wilder- played by the wondrous Derek Jacobi- and in his team, one the one side we have Spender, a determined, obstinate woman and on the other, Parkhill and other, more brutal, unsophisticated, rude, perhaps even primitive members, coming from the military ranks.
Spender is soon aghast at what happens to this phenomenal Martian civilization, with splendid works, made of silver and other precious materials, with fantastic skill.
She is also disgusted, outraged by the behavior of the men that vomit, make all sorts of vicious noises and disrespect what they find on Mars, while the rebel woman is in awe, mesmerized by the lost culture, especially after she discovers that the cause of the extinction of the Martians is...chickenpox , brought in by humans.
She explains with what would prove prophetic accuracy to the captain that people from Earth would exploit the planet in the same irresponsible manner they did on Earth and hence she wants to prevent that.
She starts by killing members of her group and is facing the captain who tries to persuade her to give up- why cover this civilization she admires in blood? - and he has a point also when he says that, given that she killed comrades, she has lost the moral authority to preach about values, what other humans should do.
Spender is killed in the confrontation, the captain having had no other choice, but the prediction that the "money men" would be sent to this planet to take out the minerals and all that can be extracted comes true.
It can be argued that there is nothing wrong with using minerals, resources from Mars, only Ray Bradbury is correct in stating, through his characters, that mankind has abused planet Earth, in extracting oil, coal and everything else and then burning it , we have brought about Climate Change- denied by idiots like the Donald - which is endangering the world we live in and which looks like becoming uninhabitable for our descendents.
The Martian Chronicles deals with the stories of the crew, a couple of the colonists and some children who try to escape a dangerous, possibly dead Earth, in this adaptation for the BBC, Radio 4.
The colonists we learn about, have arrived on e planet to...sell chili dogs, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in the opinion of the woman, but close to where a lot of action would be, in the view of the man.
There are some creatures that appear and it is not clear what they are - vermin? It that is the answer, the male partner points out that they have to deal with it without letting anyone know about it, for rats or anything of the kind mean the death of a food business...
Furthermore, they have the Best Chili Dogs in the Galaxy!
The other story that is surely taking more space in the original material, and less in an abridged version, of only a little over fifty minutes, is that of Hathaway and his family.
He is saved and he brings the two members of this visiting team to his family, wife and two children, only there are very suspicious aspects about them.
The captain had known them and the wife is his age and looks too much younger and the children, who should be in their thirties, look like teenagers.
As one of the visitors pretends to need something from the spacecraft, he calls for more intelligence, using maybe some distant future version of Alexa or Siri and finds three mounds where the graves are.
He calls his partner out and they find the shed of this Martian, where they understand what happened:
He has lost his family years ago, probably killed by a virus, and he used his skills and the tools to recreate a...family.
Artificial Intelligence in the distant, or maybe near future.
Earth suffers from devastating war, the orders are to shoot any rocket and this covers a civilian craft which has children and a teacher on board.
Alhamdulillah, the captain disobeys this gruesome mission and the children arrive on the Red Planet.
Will they be the hope for a post apocalyptic mankind?
The Martians settled after Armageddon?
May 11, 2015
The first few short stories were interesting and then they got very cringe-worthy. The story about the hot dog stand seemed excessive, a few of the stories were borderline sexist, and then the reference to Fahrenheit 451 pushed it over the edge (which I think is an overrated novel to begin with).
June 7, 2012
From "Rocket Summer" to "The Million-Year Picnic," Ray Bradbury's stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphere--shady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury's characters--the golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans. Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they've displaced. Bradbury's quiet exploration of a future that looks so much like the past is sprinkled with lighter material. In "The Silent Towns," the last man on Mars hears the phone ring and ends up on a comical blind date. But in most of these stories, Bradbury holds up a mirror to humanity that reflects a shameful treatment of "the other," yielding, time after time, a harvest of loneliness and isolation. Yet the collection ends with hope for renewal, as a colonist family turns away from the demise of the Earth towards a new future on Mars. Bradbury is a master fantasist and The Martian Chronicles are an unforgettable work of art. --Blaise Selby
May 12, 2015
In many ways, Bradbury is a 'style over substance' writer. His writing is evocative but his plots tend to get bogged down in the characterization and the scenery.
The Martian Chronicles is essentially his best effort that I've read. In my teen years, I read all his books in our school library, so take that for what it is worth.
It is still stylized and the stories do not seamlessly mesh. Mars is an excuse for his comments on life, psychology and awkward situations. But the journey is well worth the odd scenery as you float from story to story.
I enjoyed it and once again have a slight hankering to reread it.
The Martian Chronicles is essentially his best effort that I've read. In my teen years, I read all his books in our school library, so take that for what it is worth.
It is still stylized and the stories do not seamlessly mesh. Mars is an excuse for his comments on life, psychology and awkward situations. But the journey is well worth the odd scenery as you float from story to story.
I enjoyed it and once again have a slight hankering to reread it.
July 21, 2015
at least the third time I've read these stories, but I always find nuances I missed in the past.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews