On the Open Road | |
---|---|
Written by | Steve Tesich |
Characters | Al Angel The Monk The Little Girl Jesus Boy |
Date premiered | March 16, 1992 |
Place premiered | The Goodman Theatre |
Original language | English |
Subject | Post-apocalypse |
Genre | Drama |
Setting | An unnamed post-apocalyptic metropolis |
On the Open Road is a 1992 play by Steve Tesich.
It is a post-apocalyptic tale concerning the events after a "civil war" presumably within the United States although no location is given. [1] Characters drag wheeled carts filled with meager possessions through a destroyed unnamed wasteland. [2] [3] There have been numerous productions throughout the U.S. [4] [5]
The play opened on March 16, 1992 at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago directed by Robert Falls featuring Jordan Charney as Al and Steve Pickering as Angel. [6]
The setting of the play is a “place of Civil War”. There are references to Berthold Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and burlesque.
The play opens in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by marauding armies. The character Angel is seen standing on a traffic barricade. His head is in a noose and he is gagged. Al, a man pulling a cart, runs into him. The cart contains works of art, renowned artistic creations that have been ransacked and salvaged from devastated art museums. The museums were destroyed by bombs during the apocalyptic war. Angel decides to pull the cart himself in place of Al. For this, he will be freed and Al will teach him art history and musical appreciation along the way. He will pull the cart to the far-off border where these two "independents" will find liberty.
In the second act, Angel and Al are apprehended by the new coalition government. They must assassinate Jesus to obtain their release, who in a Second Coming reappears in human form as a cellist. Jesus is incarcerated in a monastery where he is tortured. A monk meets them and tells them to kill the prisoner forthwith without any delay.
The monk delivers a monologue in which he compares the Second Coming of Christ to the case of a successful contemporary playwright who must now compete with a returned William Shakespeare. The monk tells them: Jesus “must die for our art to go on”. The implication is that organized religion is a pale imitation of the real teachings of Christ and Christianity and that this failing contributed to humanity's downfall.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or any other scenario in which the outcome is apocalyptic, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
Breaking Away is a 1979 American coming of age comedy-drama film produced and directed by Peter Yates and written by Steve Tesich. It follows a group of four male teenagers in Bloomington, Indiana, who have recently graduated from high school. The film stars Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie, Paul Dooley, and Robyn Douglass.
Wasteland is a role-playing video game developed by Interplay Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1988. The first installment of the Wasteland series, it is set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic America destroyed by a nuclear holocaust generations before. Developers originally made the game for the Apple II and it was ported to the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. It was re-released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in 2013 via Steam and GOG.com, and in 2014 via Desura. A remastered version titled Wasteland Remastered was released on February 25, 2020, in honor of the original game's 30th anniversary.
Fallout is a media franchise of post-apocalyptic role-playing video games created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, at Interplay Entertainment. The series is set during the first half of the 3rd millennium, and its atompunk retrofuturistic setting and artwork are influenced by the post-war culture of the 1950s United States, with its combination of hope for the promises of technology and the lurking fear of nuclear annihilation. A forerunner of Fallout is Wasteland, a 1988 game developed by Interplay Productions. Fallout is regarded as a spiritual successor to Wasteland.
John Michael Turturro is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for his varied complex roles in independent films. He has appeared in over sixty feature films and has worked frequently with the Coen brothers, Adam Sandler, and Spike Lee. He has received a Primetime Emmy Award and nominations for four Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Golden Globe Awards.
Alfred Unser was an American automobile racing driver, the younger brother of fellow racing drivers Jerry and Bobby Unser, and father of Al Unser Jr. He was the second of four men to have won the Indianapolis 500 four times, the fourth of six to have won the race in consecutive years, and the winner of the National Championship in 1970, 1983, and 1985. The Unser family has won the Indy 500 a record nine times. He was the only person to have both a sibling (Bobby) and child as fellow Indy 500 winners. Al's nephews Johnny and Robby Unser have also competed in that race. In 1971, he became the only driver to date to win the race on his birthday.
Stojan Steve Tesich was a Serbian-American screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1979 for the film Breaking Away.
Alfred Unser Jr. – nicknamed "Little Al" to distinguish him from his father, Al Unser – is an American retired racing driver. Known primarily for his Championship car career, Unser won two CART championships, and is a two-time winner of the Indianapolis 500.
The Milwaukee Mile is a 1.015 mi (1.633 km) oval race track in the central United States, located on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Fair Park in West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb west of Milwaukee. Its grandstand and bleachers seats approximately 37,000 spectators. Opened in 1903 as a dirt track, it was paved in 1954. In addition to the oval, there is a 1.8 mi (2.9 km) road circuit located in the infield.
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and nearly all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.
The Whiteladies Picture House is a cinema on Whiteladies Road in Clifton, Bristol, England.
The Road is a 2009 American post-apocalyptic survival film directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. The film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Antony Johnston is a British writer of comics, video games, and novels. He is known for the post-apocalyptic comic series Wasteland, the graphic novel The Coldest City, and his work on several Image Comics series. In May 2023, Johnston published The Dog Sitter Detective, the first in a series.
Mad Max is an Australian media franchise created by George Miller and Byron Kennedy. It centers on a series of post-apocalyptic and dystopian action films. The franchise began in 1979 with Mad Max, and was followed by three sequels: Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); Miller directed or co-directed all four films. A spin-off, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, was released in 2024 and was also directed by Miller. Mel Gibson portrayed the title character Max Rockatansky in the first three films, while Tom Hardy portrayed the character in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Wasteland Angel is a vehicular combat shoot 'em up video game created by the Finnish independent developer team Octane Games. Released on September 1, 2011, the game is published by Meridian4 for Windows and is distributed online through Steam, Impulse, GamersGate, Direct2Drive, and Amazon Download.
Nuclear Union is a cancelled post-apocalyptic role-playing video game. It was developed by the Ukrainian company Best Way, and supposed to be funded and published by the Russian publisher 1C Company, to be released in 2014 for Microsoft Windows, but the latter pulled its involvement at the end of 2013 due to the political instability in Ukraine, resulting in the game's cancellation.
Mad Max is a 2015 action-adventure video game developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Based on the Mad Max franchise, the game follows Max Rockatansky as he progresses through the wasteland building a vehicle, the Magnum Opus, to battle against a gang of hostile raiders led by Scabrous Scrotus and reach the storied "Plains of Silence", where he hopes to find peace. Mad Max emphasizes vehicular combat, in which players can use weapon and armor upgrades on their car to fight enemies. It is set in an open post-apocalyptic wasteland consisting of deserts, canyons, and caves.
Fallout is an American post-apocalyptic drama television series created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the role-playing video game franchise created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the series stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, and Walton Goggins.
Golf Club: Nostalgia is a 2018 video game developed by Demagog Studio and published by Untold Tales. It was initially launched on June 20, 2018, on iOS and on Android in late December 2018. On September 3, 2021, it was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, after being announced at E3 2021. The game has players explore desolate ruins of the Earth that have been transformed into a golf course after an apocalyptic event kills all of humanity except for the extremely wealthy, who flee to Mars. The game's narrative is mainly told through its soundtrack, which presents itself as a radio show called "Radio Nostalgia from Mars" playing music and interviews of people reminiscing about life on Earth.
Nadja Tesich was born in Yugoslavia and reared in East Chicago, Indiana. Best known for her starring role in Éric Rohmer’s early film Nadja à Paris (1964), she was the author of the play After the Revolution (1980), followed by the novels Shadow Partisan, (1996), Native Land (1999) and Far From Vietnam (2012) and the literary memoir To Die in Chicago (2010). She was the writer and director of Film for my Son (1975) and wrote, acted or worked on numerous films, including Four Friends (1981), I Am the Cheese (1983) and The Love Lesson (1996). Her brother was Steve Tesich, the playwright, novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Breaking Away and other films. She taught film at Brooklyn College and was a lifelong political activist for workers and the oppressed people of the world.