Popular culture abhors a vacuum, and for 40 years the empty places beyond our atmosphere have been overrun with stories, fables, parodies, franchises and expressions of pure kitsch.
Founded in 1998 by Chuck Collins of Holbrook and Marlene Lowenhaupt of West Sayville, two veterans of the Long Island theater scene, Voices performs adaptations of classic plays, novels, short stories, fables and poems, but with no sets, just a few props and minimal movement.
Two overlapping arcs of short stories, Fables for Robots (Bajki Robotów), translated in the collection Mortal Engines), The Cyberiad (Cyberiada) provide a commentary on humanity in the form of a series of grotesque, humorous, fairy tale-like short stories from a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who had occasional contacts with biological "slimies" and human "palefaces").
But others suggest that the story is fable, not fact.
What held the collective together and made the method workable was the story, or fable.
"His first season became my Passover story, a fable of freedom, to be retold again and again to keep memory alive".
It is easy to see why Simonides' story — a fable about the importance of memory — speaks to Bartok, who has constructed a life on the rubble of a catastrophically ruined family.
But in the life-affirming Finnish comedy THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST (2002), amnesia is about the purity of knowing nothing, a route to the ultimate starting-a-new-life story, a fable about the human capacity for change.
Malamud's story, or fable, of Seymour Levin, an indigent English instructor from New York, "formerly a drunkard", who finds himself in exile at a "cow college" in Oregon, teaching freshmen composition, kept me spellbound.
