Cloning tale has an identity all its own

Dallas Roberts (left) and Sam Shepard in a sceen from ``A Number,'' a new play by Caryl Churchill now playing at off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop. (AP Photo/Joan Marcus)

"What's the value of these people?" asks the father to the grown son who just discovered there are clones of him walking around the city.

On one level, the man is talking real money: How many millions of dollars might a court put on the damage to an individual's "uniqueness"? Of course, since the question is being asked in "A Number," the slippery and scintillating Caryl Churchill play that opened last night at New York Theatre Workshop, such tangibles are just the tip of human valuation.

Since this profound and bitterly entertaining drama managed to coax Sam Shepard back to the stage as an actor for the first time since his off Off-Broadway heyday more than 30 years ago, we may assume the questions are more interesting than hard cash.

Little wonder that Shepard - also back in town as the playwright of the apocalyptically funny "God of Hell" - was drawn to the American premiere of English writer Churchill's dark joyride about so much more than genetic engineering.

Shepard is a lean, long-boned original in a lean, 65-minute exploration of nothing less than the meaning of identity. He plays a widower named Salter whose son Bernard learns there are "a number" of others just like him. Shepard, a hawk-headed giant with a long crew cut and the scrubbed outdoor face of a farmer, sits on an old leather sofa in a shabby flat with a thrift-shop lamp.

The other three characters are all played by Dallas Roberts, who looks like a very young and skinny John Ritter. Bernard, who has been raised by Salter, flops around in understandably feverish disbelief. He bursts out the solitary brown door and another son, also named Bernard, bursts in wearing a natty but cheap suit and a worse attitude. Eventually we meet a third son, Michael, who appears to have adapted to the new reality with a chilling equilibrium.

When "A Number" first ran at London's Royal Court Theatre, Stephen Daltry's production had an ominous formal sleekness reflected in the eery duplicity of Michael Gambon's performance as Salter. Daniel Craig (who played Paul Newman's son in "Road to Perdition") switched personalities so effortlessly that it was creepy fun to try to locate the basics in the clones' DNA.

James MacDonald, associate director of the Royal Court, has staged a more rough-edged version here, which suits the all-American, open-road Shepard and Salter's guilty, sad-sack personal history. We wish Roberts' three contrasting selves were a bit more astonishingly different and the same, but the actor has a compulsively watchable emotional honesty.

Churchill, whose more colorfully frightening "Far Away" received a stunning production at the New York Theatre Workshop two years ago, approaches the nature-nurture questions with typical unpredictability, asking deep questions with all the simplicity and suspense of a popcorn thriller. Her style, which changes wildly from work to important work, is almost Pinteresque here, with fragmented sentences that shift meaning with whiplash speed and meanings that lurk potently in the silences between the words.

Director MacDonald articulates the short scenes with a sharp click, after which we can watch Shepard pace, or rub his ornery eyes, or press his temples to the sound of an electric drone. Designer Eugene Lee, inspired by the image of a 19th century surgical theater, has torn apart this modern playhouse, putting the audience on folding chairs on risers that focus down on Salter's shabby existence.

We miss the comfort but appreciate that, like Churchill's variations on the theme of identity, the genetics of this invaluable theater remain intact.

Related topic galleries: Court Administration, Paul Newman, Sam Shepard, Michael Gambon, Daniel Craig, John Ritter

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