In the glare of many sons

‘Can we talk about what you did?”

The question — asked of a father (Victor Ertmanis) by a son (Rodrigo Beilfuss) — is simple enough.

But the answer, like every word spoken in Caryl Churchill’s A Number, is delivered almost as though elicited by the resuscitative power of an electric shock.

“Yes, of course … I’m not sure… where… what…”

It isn’t quite clear what a typical evening looks like for this pair, but as soon as opening piano chords twinkle and the old man’s apartment — coated in double-helixed wallpaper hung in segments of three — is bathed in a radiating glow, there’s little doubt that complex familial truths will soon be brought to light.

Churchill makes no secret of that: in the opening scene, the son has just learned that he wasn’t daddy’s only little boy — his uniqueness has been damaged, his identity weakened, by means of duplication.

Not just one, not just two, but a number of physically identical doppelgangers are out there.

In just one hour, with no intermission, A Number forces its base pairs — and the actors portraying them — into the eeriest corners of remorse, repressed grief and internal angst, lending hard-earned realism to a conceptual drama that never feels as far-fetched as it should.

That’s a credit to director Alex Poch Goldin’s airy approach to the text, which gives both Ertmanis and Beilfuss the opportunity to massage the play’s most effective drama and its most anxious comedy with expert precision.

No small feat: Churchill’s dialogue interlocks and often moves past itself, with streams of thought abruptly left behind without immediate resolution.

The spaces between the words are filled with a well-rounded soundscape designed by Ashley Au with Natanielle Felicitas; their interludes are essential to the characters’ sense of both impending doom and loss of their respective pasts.

Kara Pankiw’s set — a spare, three-tiered apartment loaded with emotional memory — works in perfect tandem with Ksenia Broda-Milian’s lighting, which veers from the laboratorial into the supernatural.

A fixture on local stages, Beilfuss, playing three roles, showcases a broad spectrum of communication styles, alternating between shivering nebbish, brooding ne’er-do-well and round-faced square with ease.

For a sparring partner, Beilfuss couldn’t ask for better than Ertmanis, a veteran of nine seasons with the Stratford Festival who hasn’t appeared with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre since 1989, when he played Marco in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge.

While Beilfuss’s characters have the benefit of exits and entrances, Ertmanis’ Salter — a father arrested by regret — remains onstage for the entirety of the production, unspooling himself until he reaches the brink of his own ethical disintegration.

This is made physical by the progressive shedding of his clothes: a well-coiffed man who starts out wrapped in a flush-red suit winds up dishevelled, shaking in his boxer shorts (adorned with sheep, costume designer Daina Leitold’s clever nod to Dolly, the cloned ewe).

In the program, Ertmanis writes that A Number will be his “theatrical swan song” because his “memory is still good, but the body is revolting.”

A viewer can sense that urgency even without reading about it when Salter assesses his life’s work as a parent: “I did some bad things. I deserve to suffer. I did some better things. I’d like recognition.”

Though A Number is fraught with tense drama, it’s never freighted by it. Instead, the production retains an unexpected and considerable amount of levity, best exemplified by the final of Churchill’s five scenes, set on a park bench, where Salter meets a man with less in common with him than a head of lettuce.

It’s so tragic, life, that we must laugh to understand it. Can we talk about what you did?

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca