Saugerties
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Weird Sisters Theatre Company
Through September 8
Directed by Abigail Zealey Bess, Susan Eve Haar’s drama is partially an impassioned debate about the ethics of cloning, and partially — well, I guess you might call it a watery echo of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. It’s an awkward piece of dramatic mush that feverishly gums together science fiction and histrionic absurdism.
Featuring a couple of adrenaline-driven performances and unexpected plot twists, the play admittedly boasts a number of compelling dramatic elements — but there’s ultimately something confused and hasty about its execution. One leaves with the inescapable feeling that the writer hasn’t fully fleshed out the work’s provocative themes.
Cloning, particularly the selfish cloning of loved ones, is an intrinsically fascinating subject matter — though I suspect that, when the chips are down, it would prove less ethically convulsive than you’d expect. After all, when push comes to shove, a cloned human being is just another human being, with specific individual experiences that would lead to specific individual reactions and thus a specific individual personality. To say a clone is just a copy of the original person essentially belies the notion that all humans have varying lives and experiences.
Jen (Beau Garrett) and Rog (Chad L. Coleman), a married couple, check into a seedy motel outside of Saugerties, New York. Jen doesn’t know why they’re staying there — but she and Rog engage in romantic role play between bouts of strained bickering. Jen has just learned that she’s infertile, and appears to be suffering a breakdown that Rog can’t soothe. In a desperate attempt to salvage their relationship, he has a nearby medical center create a clone, made from Jen’s DNA (remember, this takes place in the near future when such things are allowed). Meant as a gift, the clone causes an unexpected crisis for the couple.
Act Two takes place 20 years later, as the cloned Jen arrives with her boyfriend (also played by Garrett) to scatter the ashes of the deceased older “Jen.” Jen Prime, as we could call the original woman, raised her clone as her daughter after Rog walked out on them. But cloned Jen has always had daddy issues, so she doesn’t think it odd to be dating this boyfriend, who is 20 years older than she is. However, as the day passes, Jen makes some disturbing discoveries about her boyfriend, which provide a unique spin on the May-September romance thing.
Haar’s background in science writing is evident in her presentation of provocative questions about clones and cloning. For example, if you were cloned, would you consider your clone a replica of yourself or a just a younger sibling or child? Or, if a woman’s clone meets the woman’s husband some years later, would their love be incest? However interesting the questions, the play’s answers are only tepidly fleshed out and obscured by illogical arguments and confrontations that just don’t make sense.
The story takes a long time to get started, padded as it is with (irrelevant) role-playing games in which the characters alternate between wanting each other and wanting to kill each other. Under Bess’s direction, the production as a whole is stiff and claustrophobic, and her staging of its clone elements unremarkable. Probably the most engaging moment occurs during the brief intermission, as Garrett is transformed (with the help of stage manager Amber Goebel) from the original Jen into her similar-but-identifiably different clone.
During this choppy effort, a mood of genuine unease occasionally suffuses the stage, generally when we suspect that Coleman’s increasingly frustrated Rog is going to blow his stack. But mostly this comes to naught, as the point of the plot has less to do with the relationship and more to do with scattershot, half-developed ethical issues.
Garrett’s turn as both Jen and Jen’s cloned self is subtle: You see elements of the same character in both roles, but the actor adroitly delineates between Jen Prime’s rage and despair and her clone’s brittleness. As Rog, Coleman is mostly reactive, but his disturbing reveal late in Act Two engenders genuine chills. Ultimately, though, the performances are unable to rise above the script’s rambling structure and indifferent storytelling.
Hudson Guild Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; Sat., Aug. 24, 3 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 25, 7 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 31, 8 p.m.; Sun., Sep. 1, 3 p.m. & 7 p.m.; Sat., Sep. 7, 3 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sun., Sep. 8, 3 p.m. & 7 p.m.; through Sep. 8. OnStage411.com/Saugerties. Running time: 90 minutes with an intermission.
