Taken as it is billed – as a “play about human cloning” – Caryl Churchill’s A Number, running until November 26 at Granville Island’s Playwrights Theatre Centre, is not particularly successful.  Without any special insight into the evolving science around cloning, the play takes as its ethical backdrop the sort of vague, generic anxieties borne out by the thick fog of mystification through which the subject is pretty much universally considered by those of us outside the field.

Instead, A Number is most rewarding when it considers what makes us individuals, arguing emphatically and persuasively that – given that we share 99% of our genetic make-up with every human being on earth, 90% with chimpanzees, and 30% with some vegetables – what makes us specifically who we are is not genetic coding but the amalgamation of joys, traumas, and other human experiences.

Churchill’s play runs a series of vignettes between a father (Charles Siegel) and several clones of his son.  As the story unfolds, we begin to understand the role played by the father and his own pathologies in the various reproductions of his son (played with varied success by Peter Wilson, who only really seems at home in one version of the “son”).

The dialogue between father and son(s) is very often intentionally (and, unintentionally) tortured.  Siegel and Wilson still seemed to be finding their fit for Churchill’s script and its naturalistic, conversational tone, replete with constant interruptions, false starts, tangents and trailings off.  The strength of such writing is its realism; unfortunately, it is very difficult to pull off in live theatre (as opposed to film, say) and often seems stunted and uncomfortable here.

Nevertheless, A Number is a compelling story, performed in an engaging and intimate production, and deserves to be seen and considered.

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