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Identity crisis: Studio Grand Central opens ‘A Number’

Bill DeYoung

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Anthony Gervais, left, and Ward Smith in "A Number." Photo: Carol Gallagher.

Opening Thursday, Caryl Churchill’s cerebral A Number is just the sort of show for which the 44-seat Studio Grand Central was created: As founder Ward Smith says, this play is intimate. He calls it “living-room drama,” the sort of experience that just wouldn’t be the same on one of the big stages in town.

Churchill, one of Great Britain’s most lauded playwrights, gives us a chilling “what-if” scenario: In the near future, a man (called Salter in the script) has had his son cloned. Without giving away any of the plot twists, the now-adult son (called Bernard) is questioning his father about his origins: Am I the original? What happened to my mother? If I’m a clone, where is the original?

It comes to light that the son’s genetic material was secretly duplicated, by medical personnel unknown, multiple times. And that there are “a number” of Bernards out there, walking around.

There are only two people in the show: Smith himself plays the man, and Anthony Gervais appears as three versions of the son (not at the same time, of course).

From the start, the actors, and director Alan Mohney Jr., understood that the playwright left a lot of the tale open to their interpretation.

“I’m a big fan of Caryl Churchill’s; I’ve read most of her plays,” Gervais says. “This one sat with me for a while, for a couple of years after I first read it.”

What exactly is this story of lost-and-found identity saying?

“There was a time,” he adds, “when I said ‘Oh, I get it.’ But as we started working on it, that went out the window. There’s so many ways you can go with it, and there’s so many moments that are different every time.”

Offers Mohney: “There is no Rosetta Stone. You do what you can to make it what you think it is, because that’s the freedom that Churchill’s given the artist.”

According to lighting designer Michael Horn: “The show has a genetic code, and every person who produces it has their own mutation.”

Mohney and Horn have created a minimalistic set that’s vaguely futuristic and hints, in subtle ways, of genetic arithmetic. “The only note we get from the author at all,” explains Mohney, is ‘The action takes place where Salter lives.’ It doesn’t specify anything beyond that. So a lot of the fun that I had with it was trying to figure out, what’s this guy’s world like? How does he function?”

That sense of creating an interpretation of the story carries over to the script itself, Smith says. “When you read this text, it’s like Zappa sheet music. It’s written in time signatures. We’re always saying ‘Am I finishing your sentence here, or are we overlapping? Is that a hard stop?’ Because there’s no punctuation.”

Gervais: “And it’s not even written with ellipses, telling you how to stammer it.”

Mohney: “I think she used three commas and two periods in the entire thing.”

The poetic rhythms of Churchill’s dialogue, they all believe, are very British. And the characters say words, and expressions, that are straight from the streets of London.

“We started off with British accents,” Smith reports. “Then we came back in and did it without; halfway through, Alan stopped us and said ‘What the hell are you guys doing?’”

They all felt it was much better with American accents.

Ultimately, just enough is explained to get the audience thinking about what’s really occurred. “She gives us these little context clues, but it’s never fully said,” according to Gervais. “So we can decide amongst ourselves, or I as an actor can come up with my own reasons, and you as an audience member can infer. But there’s not an answer given.”

For tickets and additional information, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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