Churchill’s Shorts
★★★½
CAM Raleigh, Raleigh
Urgent memo to the genetic technicians of the near future: Do not clone the psychopaths, even—or perhaps, especially—if they pay in cash. And while you’re at it, think twice before making a human Xerox (or twenty) of the clinically depressed.
I know, it seems like common sense: Leave the Abby Normal jar alone! Yet in A Number, one of two dystopian domestic dramas by Caryl Churchill that Burning Coal Theatre Company is coproducing with CAM Raleigh, quality control has clearly broken down throughout the genetic evaluation process in the coming scientific world.
It’s a curious hour in our culture to view Churchill’s suspenseful 2002 one-act. In recent years, the fragility of those with unearned race-and-gender-based privilege has become a hot topic in American discourse. Churchill’s speculations suggest that, in a future where replicated offspring—genetic “do-overs,” as it were—can be stigmatized as inauthentic, fragility’s cultural portfolio could diversify in unexpected ways.
When the three sons of enigmatic, aging central character Salter (Mark Filiaci) learn that they were cloned, they experience one of the chilliest family reunions on record, and the trauma propels two cases of imposter’s syndrome to an improbable extreme. With actor Ben Apple, director Stephen Eckert sculpts two distinctly neurotic iterations of Salter’s son, Bernard, before the third, apparently thrown clear of the familial wreckage, finds himself embarrassed for being disappointingly well-adjusted. Salter’s agony in the presence of a scion without a dark side makes for the funniest conclusion of the three productions we’ve seen here since A Number’s 2007 local premiere.
The other Churchill short at CAM Raleigh, Far Away, has an even greater resonance with current events. A young girl named Joan (Chloe Oliver) who is visiting her aunt and uncle is too innocent to realize she’s in danger after glimpsing a late-night atrocity among a group of deportees in their back yard. But Eckert and actor Julie Oliver reduce the suspense in her aunt’s responses as she repeatedly changes a cover story to save the girl’s life by explaining something monstrous away.
Other scenes in Joan’s life during wartime follow, wedged between awkward set changes and upstaged by designer Josh Martin’s needless, annoying live video backdrops. Death-penalty tribunals are televised, around the clock, and in the most speculative fiction of all, the government finally increases funding for the arts—but only to prettify their final results. When the remaining threads of human culture are rent apart, that inspires the rest of creation to pick sides as well. Uneasy coming attractions, all in all—some of which are already here.
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