Wilma's 'A Number'

The clone's the thing

ROBERT ZALLER

Caryl Churchill’s A Number, the second and concluding production of the Wilma Theater’s Churchill mini-festival, is typical of her later work, with its spare, overlapping dialogue— hard work for American actors, who frequently talk past each other anyway. Its two performers play an indeterminate number of characters, for the subject of the play is cloning, and identity is precisely the issue. Salter (Richard Bekins) is, presumptively, the “father” of the three personae (Bernard, Bernard, and Michael) performed by Scott Barrow, but since Salter’s story keeps changing, we are never quite clear how he has come by his supposed progeny.

Bernard I has taken himself for Salter’s natural son, only to be told that he is actually the clone of a dead sibling. This gambit doesn’t hold up for long, though, since we soon meet a Bernard II, who forces from Salter the admission that the lost son had been sent away as incorrigible. We learn further that this presumed original himself had been conceived in a laboratory through in vitro fertilization, and so was not quite natural either.

The slippery slope of in vitro births

This discovery leads the spectator to pause, for in vitro births, now routinely accepted, were regarded not long ago as ethically suspect themselves. Animal cloning has taken us further down the slippery slope to human replication, which for all we know may be on the verge of realization on some island of Dr. Moreau, or perhaps at the windowless clinic down the street. We may not be ready for it, but it is for us.

The problem that in vitro fertilization presented was twofold: first, that of accepting conception without genital union or even direct physical contact between the donor parties; and second, the question of human reproduction as, at least ideally, an act of love from which a unique human entity, whether described as a “soul” or a “personality,” emerged to take its place in this world (and, on some accounts, the next). In short, there is the issue of divorcing the carnal aspect of sexuality— the heat and lust of copulating bodies— from its material result; and the related one of separating conception from the full and equal intention of the genetic partners.

Personality without parental interaction?

Of course, many a child has come into the world through violence and abuse, or simple carelessness. Certainly, reproduction must have depended for untold millennia on ignorance: The species would hardly have survived if it had had to wait upon the development of the finer human feelings. But many people felt that in vitro crossed a Rubicon of sorts, especially when the donor parties were unknown to each other. How could personality be created where there was no interaction between persons in the fullest sense?

Replication as such— cloning— seems to take us a long step further, if not into another realm. Salter’s clones, if they are his, are Salter himself, differently situated in time. They lack only a connected consciousness to be Salter immortal, not in some heaven of resurrection but in the here and now. If this is the case, of course, they cannot be themselves, but only the literal projection of someone else.

Bernard I is clearly disturbed by this idea. Salter tells him the A story, that he is the replacement of a loved child whose adult personality was never developed; he is thus not reliving someone else’s life but extending it. But this story collapses under the hostile pressure of Bernard II, who seems the personification of the bad seed story, if not the original himself.

The old 'evil men' gambit

But why should there be two versions of Bernard? As Salter tells it, further clones were created without his knowledge and consent. We are given no better explanation for this than that there are a lot of “evil men” in the world who have apparently been using Salter for their own devices.

Sure enough, a third clone, Michael, soon appears. Instead of being anxious like Bernard I or angry like Bernard II, Michael is perfectly comfortable in his own skin. He seems only to lack a self, for when Salter presses him to reveal something personal, he is naively perplexed. Presumably, Churchill wants us to understand Michael as the true clone, one who accepts his nonidentity without question.

As a play of ideas, A Number raises significant issues about our human future. As drama, however, it is largely mired in naturalistic convention. Salter seems simply a father hiding a guilty and somewhat shabby secret with the two Bernards, and they versions of the thwarted son familiar from the pages of O’Neill, Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller. Director Jiri Zizka tries to amp the spookiness with stuttering sound and film effects, and Mimi Lien’s set suggests the menace of a clinical anteroom. The two performers search for a style, but in a play that fails to create one of its own, they elicit sympathy rather than admiration. A Number wants you to think, but it never quite makes up its own mind