Caryl Churchill's A Number is an austere, difficult play about a man and his three sons — two of whom are clones made from the third. The play is demanding for several reasons. First, there's the problem of a single actor playing all three identical sons: How are we to distinguish one from the next? Then there's Churchill's language: simple, unadorned, composed of scores of sentence fragments and unpunctuated run-ons. We often have to supply in our imaginations missing words or phrases, periods or commas.
Then there's the shape of the play's five scenes, each a truncated duet involving the father and one of the sons, each just barely supplying us with crucial information about the past, distant or immediate. And finally there's Churchill's essential but arguable premise: that once human cloning becomes common, some of the originals and the clones will have extreme, even psychotic responses to learning the facts of their birth.
Put all these together and what you get is a play that demands the most deliberate, even shrewd, production: The audience somehow has to be moved, not mystified. There's a tense, thrilling drama here — if you can find it.
Unfortunately, the current, visually beautiful co-production by Stageworks and Gorilla Theatre only goes partway toward solving the problems inherent in the script. The major difficulty is that Jack Holloway's performance as Sons One, Two and Three isn't sufficiently differentiated. Of course, significant costume changes from son to son might have made everything clear, but designer Robin New offers only minimal alterations from scene to scene, until we're grateful for something as simple as a wool cap to tell us whom we're watching.
There's also a problem in Holloway's portrayal of "Bernard One," the original son from whom the others were made. Bernard One is an angry, murderous man and his vicious behavior helps us distinguish him from the others. But at key moments in his impersonation of this criminal, Holloway shows us the sensitive, pained inner man, and confusingly reminds us of tender Bernard Two. Of course, an argument could be made that these resemblances are natural in three genetically identical persons — to which I can only respond, if they keep us from following the play, they're not useful.
Still, there's good news: Even with these defects, Jim Rayfield's staging of A Number has a cold, entrancing beauty. On Scott Cooper's stunning set — a tilted, circular stage behind which are colored panels in a modernistic array — Holloway and Kerry Glamsch give us a precisely choreographed experience of a world whose soul is strangely mathematical.
Glamsch is fine as "Salter," the father who applied to have one clone made of his son, and then found that a renegade scientist had made more than 20. True, playwright Churchill hasn't given Salter much to do besides apologize to two sons and try to understand the third, but Glamsch handles both jobs with palpable distress.
And together, Glamsch and Holloway help us make sense of the backstory. It seems — I'm 90 percent sure of this — that two years after Salter's depressive wife had killed herself, Salter (an alcoholic?) found that their 4-year-old son had become somehow monstrous. So he sent the boy away — to a foster home, I imagine — but not before having him cloned.
He then raised the clone — not knowing there were others — without ever admitting to the child that he was not of woman born. When A Number begins, Sons One, Two and Three have just become aware of their genesis, and seek some degree of satisfaction from their father. Major worry: Son One is pissed and dangerous; his father may have been right in finding him frightening all those years ago.
But I don't want to frighten anyone away from A Number. Even with its confusions, it's as fascinating as a distinctly intellectual abstract painting — say, something by Kandinsky. Playwright Churchill continues to be one of the most unpredictable, innovative writers alive today, and though I didn't find her play as richly resonant as some critics have, it's still provocative and original. One can only wonder what she'll do next.
Which reminds me that, while other, more conventional playwrights have their imitators, no one's ever succeeded in cloning Caryl Churchill.
Rabbit in a Hat The acting is solid, the direction is top-notch, the Silver Meteor Gallery has never looked so good — and still Hat Trick Theatre's Alice in Wonderland is a meaningless, tiresome experience. The problem is all in The Manhattan Project's adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic — an adaptation that has none of the magic of the original, lacks plot and character to a stunning degree, and finally seems more of an exercise for actors than an opus for spectators.
This is theater for gymnasts, featuring enough jumping, climbing, flipping and contorting to qualify as an Olympic event. It's also a visually attractive production: A cartel of seven designers has doubled the size of the small Silver Meteor Gallery stage, turning it into a red-and-white checkerboard with seating at either end. On this delightfully evocative set, six fine actors — Mackenzie White (as Alice) and Curtis Belz, April Bender, Jon Cho, Aisha Duran and Magali Naas — shout joyfully, recite Jabberwocky, chase and cavort and jump over each other for an hour and a quarter without intermission or justification.
Joe Winskye's direction is visually (and athletically) impressive, even as we wonder what the heck is going on. I was grateful when Humpty-Dumpty put in an appearance — too many of my other favorite Alice characters were missing.
Congratulations, Hat Trick, on making the Silver Meteor seem actually hospitable to drama (but do get the air conditioning fixed).
Now let's see the same degree of professionalism expended on scripts that mean as much to the audience as to the performers.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.