This doesn’t bode well.

Some background: I saw a staged reading of futura at the JAW playwrighting festival last summer. Afterward, I wrote, “The first half was great—a funny, informative, engaging lecture about the history of fonts (really). Then it turned into a not terrifically original dystopian sketch of a text-free future. I hope the final production is more of the first half, and less of the second.”

But the pendulum swung hard the other direction, and the fully staged production presented here by Portland Center Stage is a sci-fi’d-out dystopian parable about the death of print, with a script that reads like last year’s lit blog conversations as processed by a playwright who’s just discovered Ray Bradbury.

In the future, the books have all been burned, paper is illegal, and no one knows how to write anymore. Ebooks that allowed readers to add “tags” and “comments” gradually degraded the integrity of digital books; now world literature is so compromised that the original versions of books are completely unavailable.

The professor reveals some of this information in her lecture about typeface, before her presentation is abruptly interrupted and she’s kidnapped by two anti-government terrorists. Her clumsy captors think she has information about the whereabouts of a mythical device called a “Zero Drive,” rumored to contain original copies of all the world’s books. I won’t ruin the ending for you, though it’s sorely tempting—suffice to say that the primacy of physical books is established once and for all.

There are real concerns facing print media, and people are right to worry about the future of the medium they love—as I type this, news just broke about 31 layoffs at Powell’s Books, for example. The effect of ebooks on the publishing industry is worth discussing, and it’s equally worth considering the sagacity of accepting a reading environment in which Amazon can yank books off our Kindles at any time. These are legit concerns, counterbalanced by the genuine ease and pleasure people derive from their ebooks, but futura is not interested in having a discussion; it’s interested in pushing a narrative agenda rooted in narrow, technophobic hysteria, in which ebooks=bad books. Worse, it’s an agenda utterly reliant on worn-out science-fiction tropes—for all playwright Harrison’s hand-wringing about the future of books, he doesn’t seem to have spent much time in the Gold Room. (That’s the sci-fi section of Powell’s, to you non-nerds out there.) Harrison’s faceless bad guys are known as “The Company.” The massive book burning is euphemistically known as “The Great Collection.” This sort of boring, boilerplate writing offers no intrinsic justification for Harrison’s basic project: updating Fahrenheit 451 for a Kindle age.

Portland Center Stage has done some truly boundary-pushing work in recent years—the great experiment that was Nancy Keystone’s Apollo, for example, or even the JAW festival itself, which fosters the development of new scripts. They’ve also leveraged social media more effectively than any other arts organization in town—comments, tags, and all. For a company that is in so many ways so forward thinking, futura feels like a step backward. One has to question the wisdom of a medium that’s constantly called upon to defend its cultural relevance (theater, I’m looking at you) aligning itself with such facile, backward-looking nostalgia.

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Futura begins with a lecture on the history of typography, delivered with the aid of beautiful slides (designed by Luke Norby) by an acerbic professor (Lori Larsen) to a class of students who have never beheld paper.

It’s a sharp, broad-ranging lesson, touching on Gutenberg, Baskerville and Times New Roman, and it was greeted with smug giggles by the audience of design snobs who’d skipped the last quarter of the Super Bowl to attend. The chuckling ceased abruptly at the beginning of the second act, as the play takes a violent and disquieting turn when the professor encounters a terrorist group bent on restoring to humanity its literary birthright. Harrison’s argument is not entirely cerebral; the stage does not go unbloodied.

The play is philosophical fiction in the tradition of Farenheit 451 and Brave New World, and Harrison’s premise is as farfetched, and much of his dialog as blatantly didactic, as those of his predecessors in the genre. But he fully commits to his vision of a world without writing, which is brought vividly to life by director Kip Fagan. Nothing in Futura feels thoughtless: from the Multi-touch-like motions with which Larsen manipulates her presentation to the smashed electronics, broken for fear of bugging, that fill the terrorist hideout. With the help of Mimi Lien’s origamilike scenic design and Casi Pacilio’s buzzing soundscape, Fagan achieves the solidity of place that so often evades theatrical sci-fi.

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Veteran Seattle actress Lori Larsen makes the Professor’s dry, snarky wit and passion for her subject so engaging that this long, talky opening is no disappointment at all. Rather, it feels like a refreshingly daring, counter-intuitive way to start a play.

The lecture gives us a necessary grounding, first of all, in the Professor’s subject, but also in her character, the society she’s in, and, by extension, the playwright’s thematic concerns. The suggestion that the audience is a class there listening to her, rather than an unknown presence beyond the fourth wall, also subtly implicates playgoers in the world of the play.

That world is a twist on “Fahrenheit 451” by way of the Google Books Library Project. “Yes, it’s real,” the Professor says, with a measure of haughtiness, when she shows the class a rare object, a piece of paper. Soon, amid her pronouncements on typographical nuances (“Serifs are nostalgic for the movement of hands no longer capable of making them”), come references to “the Company” and “the Great Collection,” and finally a system of fully digitized media she derides as “a stupor of convenience.”

Then we’re yanked out of the lecture hall and into, well, not spectacle but the tightly controlled action of a thriller, amplifying bits of info the Professor has given us about the Company’s manipulative powers and the fate of her husband, a dissident public intellectual who has been disappeared.

Originally commissioned by South Coast Repertory, “Futura” was workshopped at Portland Center Stage’s 2009 JAW playwrights festival. The key change to this completed version is that it no longer has an intermission. At JAW, the break between lecture and thriller actually made the latter part feel conventional, maybe even a little rote. Here the play establishes a rhythm that allows its energy to build, then dissipate, more effectively.

Harrison’s vision of a totalitarian global corporation controlling information is hardly a new conceit, but he uses it effectively to make us think about the way seemingly mundane changes to the way we communicate can affect intellectual freedom, privacy and meaning.

Director Kip Fagan has given the work a compelling tension and pacing, and drawn strong supporting performances from Phillip Clark, Kerry Ryan and especially Chris Murray as a bungling would-be revolutionary.

And of course it bears pointing out how Matt Frey’s alternately stark and murky lighting, Mimi Lien’s sharply differentiated sets and Casi Pacilio’s subtly machine-like sounds add to the story’s idea that sometimes design matters deeply.

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