REVIEW: Spare but potent 'Number' looks at dark side of cloning

By ANNE MARIE WELSH - For the North County Times | Wednesday, June 4, 2008 11:16 AM PDT ∞

Caryl Churchill is not only the world's most produced female playwright, she's also the most surprising. That's saying a lot, given that her artistic progeny include such highly inventive Americans as Paula Vogel, Amy Freed, and Sarah Ruhl. Just when you think you've got your bearings in the Churchill play you're watching, she sneaks in another challenging twist that makes you reconsider all that came before.

San Diego theatergoers may know the British leftist best from her 1980s hits, "Top Girls," about the price of women's success in the Reagan-Thatcher era of capitalism, and "Cloud Nine," about sex and gender shenanigans over a century. So the Churchill of the new Millennium may surprise, if not stun, all over again. Her plays have become leaner, more elliptical, more terrifyingly intense, though no less thought-provoking and entertaining.

Three cheers to Cygnet Theatre for producing Churchill's "A Number" (2002), a by turns chilling, funny, and accomplished production that opened over the weekend, directed by Esther Emery.

On the surface, the hourlong play is about human cloning, but that's like saying "Hamlet" is about revenge: The subject doesn't begin to account for the play's provocations.

D.W. Jacobs, co-founder of San Diego Repertory Theatre, returns to the local stage as a befuddled, guilt-addled father whose opening line is the play's title: "A number ...." Standing before him is an equally dazed, yet loving son Bernard (Francis Gercke, in excellent form as three genetically identical, yet very different "sons," of whom we'll learn more later).

This young man has just learned that there may be as many of 20 of himself out there. Where? Time and place, as in Churchill's brilliant and horrifying "Far Away" (2000), are left purposely vague.

Little by little, we do learn how and why these Bernard look-alikes came to be, but whatever mad scientist took the liberty of multiplying Salter's wish for a single duplicate son is beside the point. Churchill engages us first in a puzzle of overlapping questions and comments between the beleaguered father and this son he raised, a pair whose past has not been what the young man was told or the older man hoped for.

The actors' back-and-forth proved too tentative in its rhythms on opening night, a kind of staccato tennis match rather than a conversation composed of halting sentences, broken words and silences. But Jacobs and Gercke soon found the play's style and pace, and a few minutes in, "A Number" became a gripping ---- and sometimes bleakly hilarious ---- meditation upon the meaning of human individuality and identity and the cost of both neglecting and projecting "perfection" upon one's children.

Gercke reappears a half-dozen times during the play's packed-with-meaning 60 minutes. As the second Bernard, an angry, violent son who hates his father for the good reasons indirectly revealed, this versatile, highly physical actor is completely convincing ---- especially in a tenderly re-enacted moment of childhood need.

In that moment, too, Jacobs' Salter nearly melts into love, reaching toward this other Bernard, but seemingly jolted by fear and the son's loathing as he nearly touches him.

As the plot unfolds, Churchill complicates the contrasting psychologies of the first two Bernards, intensifying the suspense, raising knotty questions about nature and nurture. The father, meanwhile, distances himself from his feelings about this experiment gone awry by imagining how wealthy all three might become if they sue the hospital for breach of promise.

Emery and company allow Churchill's mordant political humor to slice through the tension without destroying it. And in the final scene, both Salter and the audience have the rug pulled out from under them one last time, with the appearance of the third "son," a happy-go-lucky math teacher who thinks his cloneship is merely "fascinating" and "delightful."

With deadpan irony, Gercke's khaki-clad Michael is the kind of guy who knows "the world is a mess," but who "can't help feeling wonderful." The actor is at his best here, evoking a kind of Stepford husband, the scariest of all the characters.

The implications of this packed, fraught, yet economical production resonate long after the production closes.

Designer Jungah Han sets the action in a blue-tiled room that resembles a doctor's office, though it's backed by a large pane of glass that suggests a huge aquarium or the see-the-babies nursery window of a maternity hospital. George Ye's sound design moves subtly from "Twilight Zone" abstraction toward more conventional (and beautiful) vocal music as we accustom ourselves to Churchill's oddly sinister world. Veronica Murphy's costumes are just right, too.

With just two actors, one set, a short running time, yet so much theatrical substance, Cygnet's "A Number" raises hope that Churchill's other recent plays will be seen here too ---- "Far Away" with its lunatic parade of couture hats designed by tortured inmates of a political prison, or "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" about Tony Blair's tragic infatuation with the person and policies of George W. Bush.

"A Number"

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; through June 29

Where: Cygnet Theatre, 6663 El Cajon Blvd., San Diego

Tickets: $22-$31

Phone: (619) 337-1525

Web: www.cygnettheatre.com

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