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Sound the alarm
A Clockwork Orange is a bad apple
BY STEVE VINEBERG
A Clockwork Orange
By Anthony Burgess. Directed by Shawn LaCount and Mark Abby VanDerzee. Set by David LaCount. Costumes by Sara Liebmann & Stacy Scibelli. Lighting by Jeff Adelberg. Music by the Dresden Dolls. With Raymond Ramirez, Brian Quint, Brian Fahey, Mason Sand, Tony Dangerfield, Kristian Williams, James Milord, and Ed Hoopman. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts through August 14.


A Clockwork Orange is a perfect example of how a popular misrepresentation can supplant its source. The 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, set in a not-so-futuristic London overrun by street gangs and focused on the narrator, a teenage punk who’s imprisoned for murder and reconditioned to abhor violence, is both a brilliant satirical commentary on a world edging toward the removal of free will and a defense of art and humanism. (The experiments performed on Alex drive him to nausea not only at the thought of violence — or sex, which he’s always coupled with violence — but also at the thought of classical music, which has been his sole civilized passion.) But Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version, which is much better known than the book, turned Alex into an exuberant hero by caricaturing everyone else; it was a trendy slice of pop nihilism. And especially since the novel was published in this country without the last chapter, which casts a philosophical backward glance on Alex’s adolescence, it was easy for readers who came to it after Kubrick’s film had saturated their senses to overlook Burgess’s perspective and view the book as a confirmation of what they’d seen up on the screen.

Burgess did write his own dramatic treatment of the book, which the Royal Shakespeare Company presented in England in 1990. Currently you can see it performed by the young Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, with ersatz Kurt Weill music by the Dresden Dolls. Is Burgess’s version any good? I would guess no, but whatever he may have intended has been swallowed up by the truly wretched production. The score may suggest Brechtian kabarett, and the dyed-hair mannequins among the crowd at the milk bar where Alex and his pals ("droogs" in "nadsat," the English-Russian patois favored by the teenagers in the story) imbibe chemical milkshakes are a nod to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, but the style of the show is actually a sort of collage of expressionistic elements. Unfortunately, the directors, Shawn LaCount and Mark Abby VanDerzee, don’t have either the vision or the skill required for expressionism. The set by David LaCount, which includes a pop-up thrust stage, is ingenious (and Jeff Adelberg’s lighting makes the most of it), but the staging veers between clumsiness and ineptitude.

Perhaps we’re meant to be dazzled by the energy of the ensemble, but energy is an inadequate substitution for the virtues of good acting. The physical work of the actors is sloppy and shapeless; no one suggests a character or plays an objective. And the vocal work is appalling. You would imagine that, given the demands of a script written half in "nadsat," the directors might have made an attempt to work with the actors on the language, but Raymond Ramirez, who plays Alex, and the other performers in the teenage roles shout almost every line — in a black-box space that seats about 150, that’s a dreadful assault on the audience — so the text is garbled. (A friendly note to Ramirez: he’s straining his voice so badly that if he doesn’t take it down a few notches, he’s going to wind up with laryngitis or nodes on his vocal cords.)

"Expressionism" here means indulging everyone on stage in his or her private brand of hamminess. Although no attempt has been made to retain the English setting, two of the actors speak in untutored cockney accents, and a prison guard does a terrible Irish brogue. Brian Quint, who plays Alex’s probation officer, Deltoid (as well as several other parts), reads all his lines like a sarcastic little boy. He’s the most grating of the actors, but the vocal posturings of Brian Fahey as the chaplain aren’t much better. By encouraging the obviously untrained ensemble members to follow their own individual bents, the directors hang them out to dry — especially when they’re saddled with some of the abominations that pass for costumes here. (As the doctor who supervises Alex’s treatment, Mason Sand wears something that looks like a splayed moth around his neck; the chaplain wears a boa around his neck like a lei.) A Clockwork Orange is set in a world gone mad, but that doesn’t mean that a production of it can throw away all professional discipline.


Issue Date: July 30 - August 5, 2004
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