Theater Review - Crime watch

Droog. Viddy. Millicents. Yarbles. If those words mean nothing to you, you’ve probably never seen Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange or read Anthony Burgess’ original 1963 novel. If you have, Burgess’ invented slang, which sounds like Finnegan’s Wake half-translated into Russian, can come back to you surprisingly quickly when you see Clockwork’s stage treatment. “Oh yeah, ‘horrorshow’ means ‘good,’” you’ll recall.
Adapated by the late Burgess himself, the theatrical version of Clockwork can have stretches of dense dialogue, but it’s generally no harder to discern than the dialogue in a Guy Ritchie film. In its lively production with only a few rough edges, Sensurround Stagings does justice to the material and should intrigue both the uninitiated and the longtime fans of the original.
Our “humble narrator” is Alex (Justin Wellborn), a sociopathic hooligan in England of the near future. In the play’s first act we see him and his fellow “droogs” embark on crime sprees that include rape, robbery, assault and brawling, with some hair-raisingly vigorous fight choreography. The show’s content can be tough, but it features no nudity and the bouts of “ultraviolence” have little stage gore.
Alex’s venal ways catch up with him and send him to prison, but he volunteers for an experimental treatment that gives prisoners early release. He accepts a kind of Pavlovian brainwashing technique that renders him unable to commit violence, even in self-defense, and also poisons him against sex and the music of his beloved “Ludwig Van.” Back on the streets, Alex learns all too well that what goes around comes around, and unlike the Kubrick film, the play makes the title explicit, questioning whether a human without free will is human at all. Rob Nixon provides a funny turn as a boozing prison priest who provides the show’s moral arguments.
Any Clockwork Orange is only as good as its Alex, and Wellborn does an unnervingly effective job. His demeanor is boyish enough to suit the role’s age (Alex is 14 years old), yet he commits vicious acts with high spirits, like a bloodthirsty Peter Pan. Wellborn consistently proves one of Atlanta’s most original and expressive actors in terms of physical movement, and remaining on-stage for nearly the entire running time, twirling a cane like Jim Carrey’s Riddler, seems like an exertion worthy of a marathon.
The play retains the book’s original epilogue, left out of the Kubrick film and early U.S. editions of the novel. We take up with Alex two years after experiencing several reversals of fortune, only to find the young thug mellowing out. Arguably it softens the ending of the film — Burgess has more faith in humanity than Kubrick — but it’s a welcome inclusion for a play, giving Wellborn and other players the chance to hit some quiet, mature notes, in contrast to the loud, ugly confrontations of the rest of the show.
The play has some missteps, some of which can be laid at Burgess’ feet, like a rhyming press conference that overplays the satire. Occasionally the production reveals some limitations of its own: Having Wellborn run through an open curtain isn’t much of a substitute for leaping out a window. Apart from Wellborn, the actors all juggle multiple roles, and some seem under-defined and unconvincing. Seven roles may be too many for Meg McGarry, who plays everyone from Alex’s mother to a rape victim to a scantily clad coquette, as if the show is taking pains to make a muddled Freudian point.
But more often director Michael Katinsky and the Sensurround crew make effective use of simple sets and props, like the industrial brick walls that revolve to sterile white ones, or the prison scrubs that have giant bar-codes across the front. The show avoids the all-white gang colors, false eyelashes and bowler hats of the Kubrick film but does include cod pieces. And the show includes some perceptive contemporary touches, like drowning out Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” with the Chumbawumba song.
Audiences are unlikely to find Sensurround’s Clockwork as shocking as the Kubrick film, and not just because the show proves less graphic. Clockwork’s violent vision seems all too likely today, and in an era when chemical castration is considered for sex offenders, rehabilitation-by-brainwashing seems perfectly plausible. Sensurround Staging proves that Clockwork Orange comfortably fits the guerrilla-theater approach and raises the same question as Burgess and Kubrick: What if the cure to crime were worse than the disease?
Sensurround Stagings presents A Clockwork Orange through March 24 at Dad’s Garage Theatre, 280 Elizabeth St., with performances at 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. with 3 p.m. matinees March 11 and 18. $12-$15. 404-524-0302.