A Number: The Clone Sleeps Alone

A Number was written by the English playwright Caryl Churchill, who finds realism constraining. So, the set is a bare stage with two chairs. The clones Bernard I and II are signified by Peter Crook unbuttoning his dress shirt and rolling up the sleeves. (A more distinctive change, especially for an English audience, is the lower class accent of Bernard I.) The play opens with an elderly father, Kevin Tighe, discussing with his son the odd occurrence his son is recounting, in that the hospital has just told him there are multiple clones of him running around.

We liked Kevin Tighe as the father, Salter. He looks right, weathered and respectable, in a way that plays nicely against what you discover about him later on. Yet the play's language includes the verbal tic of not finishing sentences, and though Salter is the prime offender, Tighe hadn't figured out a way to bring it off successfully consistently -- he gave the impression of waiting for Crook to begin his line, not of having lost the word he was looking for.

Peter Crook is everything you could ask for for such a unique performance, able to step from one clone character to another credibly, but more than that, to invest each with a blend of similarities and differences. His shaved head seemed a little on the nose -- you know, clones not tending to have hair in popular media. We don't know why that is. Real clones will be astounded by this later, we suspect. Anyway, it seems to serve as an announcement of difference.

As it turns out, Salter has a history of drinking; he frequently apologizes to the Bernards for not being a better father. What he might have done, precisely, he leaves out. He displays an alcoholic's unease with uncomfortable truths, and his aphasic, unfinished sentences possibly indicate brain damage from long-term, heavy drinking.

The Bernards' early childhoods would seem to have trauma enough; Bernard I appears more scarred by it (he has vivid memories of what it was like under his bed). Bernard II arrived nearer the tail end. So the cloning the play actually dramatizes, we think, is the cloning of personalities due to trauma that is the hallmark of MPD/DID. In this view, it's no accident that Bernard I, who remembers his father as an abusive drunk, is much more troubled emotionally than Bernard II -- who still has, as they say, trust issues.

Without this context, the clone characters appear singularly without variation of affect and motivation. But with it, the agreeable Bernard II's discovery that he's a clone prompts the appearance of the violent, angry Bernard I. After the resolution of their conflict, the clone Michael Black appears, wonderfully at peace with the world and yet remarkably emotionally independent of his genetic father (which is congruent with the apparent facts -- his being a clone -- but also with an underlying emotional logic).

We can't say for sure that Churchill consciously chose the topic of cloning as misdirection, but we will say that we stayed because of the urge to puzzle this out. If we had imagined this play's thoughts on nature/nurture and cloning ethics were the highlights of the evening, in addition to the mannered, Beckett-lite speech, we would have made for the exit about halfway.

Peter Crook and Kevin Tighe in ACT Theatre's production of A Number by Caryl Churchill. Photo by Chris Bennion.