A Number
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Spare in language and rich in ideas, Churchill’s 2002 A Number, now receiving its local premiere from Next Theatre Company, is even more chilling than her 2000 fantasia of global warfare, Far Away, which Next performed two years ago. Just an hour long, A Number deals with cloning–but that’s like saying Glengarry Glen Ross is about real estate. Cloning guides the plot, but Churchill also addresses parental neglect, urban paranoia, and the entirely human but inevitably monstrous desire to erase the past. Salter, a middle-aged Brit, confronts three grown versions of his son, Bernard. Numbed by grief, drugs, and alcohol after his wife’s suicide
(at least that’s his story), Salter gave up Bernard One to a welfare agency. Later Salter decided he wanted to make a fresh start with another child–“one just the same because that seemed to me the most perfect,” he explains to Bernard Two, the person he raised. Trouble is, an unethical (now deceased) doctor at the lab created about 20 other Bernards.
