‘Bradbury X 2’ Explores the Limitless Reaches

Throughout a career spanning print, film, theater and architecture, Ray Bradbury has remained a storyteller first and foremost. And at the heart of his stories--despite their wide diversity of plots, settings and characters--beats an unwavering elemental drumbeat celebrating our uniquely human capacity for wonder.

At 81, Bradbury’s reverence for the limitless imagination of childhood hasn’t dimmed, and that signature theme unites the one-acts paired in “Bradbury X 2” at Theatre West. Adapted by Bradbury from two of his short stories from the 1960s, the pieces showcase different facets of the author’s complex personality. And while they don’t entirely shed their literary DNA in this translation to the floorboards, handsome staging by Charles Rome Smith successfully illuminates the ageless appeal of Bradbury’s expansive spirit.

“To the Chicago Abyss,” the shorter, opening piece, is also the more theatrically accomplished--an eerie sojourn with Bradbury in his futurist nightmare mood. In a grim post-apocalyptic society of carefully rationed material and spiritual sustenance, an authoritarian government struggles to stamp out every trace of the world that had gone before.

One of the last holdouts is a homeless Old Man (feisty Alan Oppenheimer), who kindles faint embers of freedom and joy through his reminiscences about the simple, vanishing delights of coffee, cigarettes and “swallowing a whole universe of stars and comets in a Milky Way bar.”

The Old Man’s ability to elicit sympathy from strangers threatens the System, so he lives in the shadows as a fugitive from the sinister government (shades of “Fahrenheit 451”), relying on the kindness of quietly sympathetic rebels (David Evans Brandt, Kathie Barnes).

Although the Old Man’s recitations of bygone pleasures sound at times like a laundry list, Oppenheimer’s intense, thoroughly committed performance invests the role with urgency and pathos.

The second piece, “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine,” pays affectionate homage to the retro Americana of Bradbury’s youth, reminiscent in tone of Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine.”

Amid the simple charms of small-town life, a young boy (Soren Fulton, sharing the role with Jeremy Sumpter) discovers a universe of mystery and magic in the arrival of a stranger (Steve Nevil) purporting to be Charles Dickens. “Mr. Dickens” turns out to be an aspiring writer for whom the works of 19th century novelists took on more reality than his own. Despite a distracting dialogue tendency to wax overly literary, a nicely modulated balance of whimsy and nostalgia carries the piece--especially in the finale, which unites Dickens with an equally eccentric poet named Emily (Barnes).

Bradbury invests far more symbolic weight to the clear-sighted innocence of childhood than a child actor can reasonably be expected to bear, and the audience has to make up the difference with a projection of empathy. That’s not hard to extend, given the good-natured appeal of the piece.

The rich emotional content of his tales has always made Bradbury an awkward fit within the science fiction genre in which he is often pigeonholed. These are not deeply thought pieces, but they are deeply felt in both their telling and staging.

“Bradbury X 2,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 30. $25. (323) 851-7977. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.