Defiant Theatre; Gallery 37’s Storefront Theatre; 66 E. Randolph
through Oct. 16; tickets: $15; (312) 742-8497
After an 11-year and highly respected run of in-your-face plays, Defiant Theatre, a stalwart member of the city’s army of audacious punk rock theater troupes, is throwing in the towel and shutting down operations. But you can bet that when this ragtag group calls it quits, it doesn’t just throw in the towel; it shoots it out of a cannon.
Its farewell to Chicago is a stage adaptation of “A Clockwork Orange,” Anthony Burgess’s milky white concerto of uber-violence and psychological perversion. Directed by Christopher William Johnson, in its grandest moments “Clockwork’s” hallucinatory scenes teeming with barbarism and bracing, vivid imagery teach us a few lessons about our awareness of violence. The rest of the time, it’s merely a swell adaptation that should more than satisfy any of the many fans of Burgess’s novel or this veteran company (two fan groups that most likely overlap).
The story should be familiar to most everyone who saw the 1971 movie; Alex is a supremely violent young British lad who spends his time hanging out with his mates in a milk bar and ravaging the countryside. When he’s sent to prison for murdering an elderly woman, he becomes the guinea pig for a state-sponsored project geared to remove the criminal impulses from violent felons. Forced to watch endless hours of filmed carnage, Alex is terrorized to the point of madness.
To its credit, the staging draws on the mod queerness of Stanley Kubrick’s film version without mimicking it or making you wish you were watching it. The production does, though, feature almost unspeakable acts of savagery that is uncharacteristic of live theater, and certainly out of synch the posh downtown digs of Gallery 37, where the play is being performed.
In a large cast that’s uniformly strong, the standouts are all Chicago veterans. As a widower who’s onto the government’s plot to dehumanize humans, Peter Davis gives generous sanity to his crackpot character. Defiant company members Will Schultz and the enigmatically named BF are both marvelous as a fire-and-brimstone prison clergy and Alex’s doddering, obliviously father, respectively.
If the overall arc of the show occasionally sags just a bit, it may be for the same reason that Defiant is putting itself out to pasture: its artists are all a little tired. Common sense dictates that you can only be defiant for so long before it starts to wear yourself out. But “Clockwork Orange” is still a fitting end to its raucous legacy.
