Taking a risk like `Clockwork'

Company plans daring BCA debut

By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff | July 18, 2004

A young man -- a boy, really -- sits rigid in a chair on the Brookline High auditorium stage while another boy maniacally licks his face, twists his ears, and bites him on the mouth. The character in the chair, whose name is Alex, doesn't move. A lovely woman appears and begins to dance seductively, rubbing her body against Alex's, inviting him to touch her. Alex keeps his hands to himself. The woman spits in his face and a group of spectators applaud approvingly. Mission accomplished.

The novel and film version of "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess's dystopian tale of a teenage thug whose moral depravity is exceeded only by the government authorities who reprogram him, are infamous. But the play, adapted by Burgess himself in 1990 for the Royal Shakespeare Company, is rarely performed, not to mention thematically treacherous, politically charged, and challenging to mount -- which is why Boston's award-winning fringe theater group Company One has chosen the show to launch its sixth season and its residency at the Boston Center for the Arts.

"Instead of finding the perfect small piece that we knew we could wrap our hands around and do easily, we decided to go all out, mark our spot, take the big risk," says Company One artistic director Shawn LaCount. "The first thing we do as [BCA] residents should be something that really represents us. `A Clockwork Orange' is dangerous and large and ugly and dirty. Those are not words associated with most shows in Boston."

Indeed, odds are slim that any other local theater company has recently enlisted the services of a brutality consultant. In addition, a pair of fight choreographers have been hired to stage a massive gang encounter and the show's many episodes of the old ultra-violence. But fans of Stanley Kubrick's chilling 1971 film are in for some surprises, says LaCount, who is directing the stage production, which opens on Thursday. Gone are many of the movie's hallmarks, from the British dialect to Alex's notorious bowler hat. A multi-ethnic crew tears through a newly imagined urban-industrial wasteland led by Raymond Ramirez, an 18-year-old actor who graduated last month from the Boston Arts Academy.

Ramirez -- who appeared in Company One's production of "Twilight: Los Angeles" in 2002 -- has never seen the film, and he's just beginning to read the book to glean some insights into the milk-drinking teenage rapist he's playing. Despite his youth and relative inexperience, however, Ramirez in the lead role is one of the reasons LaCount isn't completely terrified at the prospect of mounting this show.

"Two years ago Raymond showed glimpses of being able to dominate a space, and I've watched him evolve and mature as an actor," says LaCount. "He is finding the vulnerability and total insecurity of a 14-year-old and also the character's masculinity and violent strength. He's breathing the air of Alex these days."

Perhaps the most surprising feature of Company One's production will be the ending, based on the final chapter of Burgess's 1962 novel, which was cut from both the version published in the United States and from Kubrick's film. In it, Alex outgrows his violent impulses and experiences a sort of redemption, musing on fatherhood and coming to the realization that his energy is better spent on creation than destruction.

"There's an element of fate in this show that isn't neccessarily there in the movie," says LaCount. "There's this idea of taking responsibility. That's a big one that we deal with, personally and also professionally, as a company. At the heart it's a coming-of-age story, and this company is coming of age."

This company is also putting on a show that's harshly critical of an authoritarian government of dubious morality intent on imposing order at the expense of free will -- during the Democratic National Convention.

"There is some political stuff in the piece," says codirector Mark VanDerzee, "and regardless of what we believe it's nice to just throw that out there around this time every four years or so, for people to think about."

"The story is relevant no matter when it's done," adds LaCount. "It's about legislating morality and it's about how we're doing that right now in America, in the way government finds its way into religion, into family."

Music is a crucial part of "A Clockwork Orange"; one of the film's most notorious scenes shows Alex and his Droogs on a murderous spree accompanied by the uplifting strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Alex later develops an aversion to his beloved Beethoven, whose music accompanies the horrific sequences of filmed violence that he watches during his rehabilitation. The Royal Shakespeare Company's theatrical version used songs composed especially for the production by Bono and the Edge of the rock band U2. Company One has had the good fortune to hook up with the local punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls, whose classically trained pianist and singer, Amanda Palmer, is a Beethoven aficionado and whose musical aesthetic -- shot through with dark humor and decadent, violent beauty -- is strikingly simpatico with the show.

"Their mood fits perfectly, and so we called them on a lark, expecting they would be too busy to do it because they were going to be on tour with Lollapalooza this summer," says VanDerzee. "But Amanda was so into it, the following week we were at her place and she had her Beethoven CDs spread out."

Lollapalooza was canceled, but Palmer and her partner, drummer Brian Viglione, were in the throes of touring and recording and still had to rush through the project, which she says she would have loved to linger over.

"I wish I had had scads of time with the script and could have sat down with designers and the director and spent six months meticulously composing lots of original music," says Palmer, who gave the company permission to use tracks from the Dresden Dolls' recordings. "But I was so familiar with the book and the movie and the original soundtrack by Wendy Carlos, which was this very weird electronic music based on Beethoven, I decided to give it a crack in the limited time we had.

"We had a pretty good map of the play and where the music was going to land, so I picked a couple of themes -- the opening notes of the Fifth, the most memorable theme from the Ninth, and the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata -- and Brian and I went into the studio and just went crazy improvising." Complacency is anathema to Company One, which set out six years ago to lure a younger and more diverse audience to the theater with radical, challenging works. The company won its first Elliot Norton award, for outstanding local fringe production, for last season's "Jesus Hopped the `A' Train," and the residency should give a boost to its innovative programming and education program for teenagers and college students.

But "A Clockwork Orange," LaCount freely admits, isn't for the mainstream theatergoing public. Devotees of the film, he says, are going to hate it. He agrees that brave is the best word to describe the decision to mount this show.

"When I'm comfortable with what I'm doing, it's usually not the right thing for myself or the company," says LaCount. "This is terrifying in a lot of ways. In a lot of good ways."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.