Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2005 > October > 21 > Entry
‘A Number’ and ‘Sleepy’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEWS. “A Number,” 7 Stages. Through Nov. 6. “Sleepy,” Dad’s Garage. Through Nov. 5.
In Steve Yockey’s world premiere “Sleepy,” a man sees a mirror image of himself get into a taxi and disappear. He wants to know who this person is, and as he tries to find out, he becomes engulfed in a group of passers-by who keep confusing total strangers for old friends.
In Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” a young man discovers that he has been cloned, and as the play unfolds, he and the “others” denounce their biological father for the fatal soul disorder that he has spawned.
Just in time for Halloween, Atlanta theatergoers are being treated to a pair of hourlong shows that reflect on notions of identity in strange and disturbing ways. These disparate dark comedies make fascinating bedfellows for exploring ideas about dreams and consciousness, the inner and outer selves and the shadowy no-man’s-land between science and spirituality, love and obsession, madness and memory.
No surprise that British dramatist Churchill delivers a spellbinding play. Tony Kushner calls her the greatest living playwright in the language. 7 Stages wanted to do “A Number” last season, but some guy named Sam Shepherd took an interest in it and ended up appearing in the off-Broadway production.
What’s exciting here is that director Joe Gfaller and his first-rate team of actors and designers have turned “A Number” into one of the most essential and electrifying tickets of the fall season, and that the Little Five Points theater has programmed a veritable Churchill festival, with “Far Away” opening Oct. 27.
Meanwhile, just a few blocks away at Dad’s Garage, director Kate Warner inaugurates her first Top Shelf series with a cycle of short, interconnected plays by Yockey, a 28-year-old Atlanta writer who’s proving to be one of his generation’s most promising home-grown talents. (“Help!” —- an ensemble-generated piece he scripted for Out of Hand Theater —- recently played the New York International Fringe Festival.)
In Yockey’s sweetly named “Sleepy” —- that’s the blanket title for his four one-acts —- he constructs a landscape of psychological edginess from the most prosaic images. Couples wear pajamas and drink milk in the middle of the night, just like your average insomniacs. Yet somewhere in the distance, a bell tolls, and shaded figures lurk on the beveled edge of illusion and reality. Yockey’s regular Joes and Janes are haunted by nightmares and auras and exist in a Borgesian labyrinth of panic, fear and compulsion.
In “Aquarium,” the strongest of these shorts, a young woman (Alison Hastings) has a weird obsession with jellyfish that’s linked to the coldblooded murder of her parents, which she recalls with the innocence of a trusting, bleary-eyed child. “Milk,” the weakest of the tales, is about a one-sided breakup and its attendant visions and fantasies; it features Lauren Gunderson and Joe Sykes as the doomed couple. “Headphones” describes a case of unrequited love that escalates in hair-trigger fashion from clandestine confession to murderous rage. (Hastings plays the girl in headphones, Rachel Craw her shy companion.) Matt Myers turns up in “Hotel,” as the character who creates havoc when he casually bumps into himself.
Yockey’s fastidious craftsmanship is both the blessing and the curse of his slender, elegant conceit, which ultimately feels like an unmade bed. Deliberately chilly and bewildering, these ironic studies go full circle in structure and raise trenchant spiritual and philosophical questions, but they leave you thinking that the writer has written himself into a clever dead-end.
The idea of the twin (or triplicate) self is exploited with riveting, clinical precision in “A Number.” Whereas “Sleepy” is a series of constantly opening doors, “A Number” forces us to look through a single domestic keyhole. But even as the screws are tightened, the tone is deliberately murky. In neither story can we quite connect the dots.
Churchill’s tale has the rhythmic patter of Beckett and the indelible imprint of Greek tragedy. In allowing his son’s DNA to be replicated without considering the consequences, a father (Larry Larson) has done a terrible deed. The gods are angry, not to mention the three sons. Justice and revenge must be meted out.
Larson plays the dad as scared, untrustworthy and somehow grief-stricken. At one point, he says the mother committed suicide; later, he says she died in a car crash with the original boy. As the damaged offspring, John Benzinger sketches a series of personalities that go from shocked to violent to detached. “Don’t they say you die if you meet yourself?” says the first son, posing a spiritual question that proves prophetic.
Set designer Kelly Allison has walled the tiny square set in gleaming white tile and appointed it with Mies van de Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs and Eileen Gray’s chrome and glass tables. As we have come to expect from Gfaller (who directed 7 Stages’ “Boston Marriage” earlier this year), every “t” is crossed, every “i” dotted. He’s a young director with exceptionally smart taste.
In “Sleepy” and “A Number,” we are twice thrilled. For once, seeing double pays off. How cool is that?
THE 411: “A Number” 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Also 6 p.m. Wednesday and Nov. 2, noon Thursday and 9:30 p.m. Nov. 4. Through Nov. 6. $20-$25. 7 Stages, Back Stage, 1105 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, www.7stages.org.
“Sleepy” 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Through Nov. 5. $15. Dad’s Garage, Top Shelf Theatre, 280 Elizabeth St., Atlanta. 404-523-3141, www.dadsgarage.com.
THE VERDICT: A chilling double feature.
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