My three sons

British dramatist Caryl Churchill always has her eye a little further up on the horizon than the playwrights around her. Far Away, her abstracted, one-hour forecast of a culture sliding headlong into barbarism, was praised for tapping the September 11 zeitgeist when it premiered in New York in 2002. And yet it originally premiered in London in 2000, long before our country and hers spearheaded the kind of bloody global conflict that play predicted.

Now, as lesser writers are still trying to sort out the morals and consequences of those events, Churchill has left them in the dust and set her sights on issues of identity in the age of genetic engineering. Cloning research and DNA experimentation aren’t going to stop just for the sake of a noisy war, and Churchill’s worldview hasn’t been too clouded by that conflict to write A Number, which now makes its Chicago debut. Directed by B.J. Jones at Evanston’s Next Theatre (which in the past few seasons has put together the most daring programming lineup in the city), it’s an ice-water jolt of a production, leaving a chill that won’t be going away with the spring thaw.

The just-that-side-of-sci-fi setup is, of course, deceptively simple. Salter (John Judd), a man who lost his four-year-old beloved son and had a new kid made from the dead one’s DNA, is confronted by three different adult children who were made from the same batch (each played by Jay Whittaker). Each takes a different emotional toll on him; one’s coldly violent, one blandly passive, one oafishly optimistic. (We know there are at least 16 others, by the way.) And although an offstage bit of violence is what seems to shape the play, it’s Salter’s inability to reckon with his own wrecked life that gives it a tragic arc. No matter how many chances cloning gives him to get it right as a dad, he’s still bound to screw it all up.

It’s both a blessing and a curse (and a slight pain in the ass) that this important playwright no longer gives interviews—and hasn’t for years—as that leaves us to our own devices to decipher her abstruse work. In A Number, for example, there’s enough meat to facilitate a week’s worth of debate about cloning, even though the play’s running time is less than an hour. And yet test-tube reproduction is often a red herring here, a device Churchill uses to make us think hard about bioethics while she’s sneaking in ideas about parent-child relationships.

Judd’s performance is like a noise-jazz riff on Willy Loman. A dishrag shell of a man whose only chance at redemption (to say nothing of greatness through legacy) comes through his son(s), Judd’s Salter is like a tantrum-exhausted toddler in a man’s suit. Judd knows how to use his naturally craggy facial features and tired voice to fine effect.

Whittaker, meanwhile, is giving the most precise performance currently on a Chicago stage, playing both Cain and Abel (and then Opie) in turns that are at once calculated and generous. With laser eyes and a crisp, nearly robotic voice (which can shatter decibel levels on a hairpin turn), he manages to create three characters who are never quite droids, but also not altogether human.

Next’s version of A Number is notably spook-house frightening, thanks to Jones’s design team. Joshua Horvath’s original music will freak you out in between the play’s five movements. And lighting designer Diane D. Fairchild uses industrial fluorescents from above and below to create that gross, pallid sense that nothing good can happen in this room. (Also, never underestimate the power of a real blackout, now an endangered special effect thanks to fire-marshal codes that require lighted exit signs. Next’s signs are located in the back of the theater, and never prevent the possibility of total blackness.)

It might be several years before it’s completely clear what A Number is hinting at. By then though, of course, Carol Churchill will be writing something else.

Review
A Number
By Caryl Churchill. Dir. B.J. Jones. With John Judd, Jay Whittaker. Next Theatre Company.