LOS ANGELES TIMES
Sept. 19, 2002
A quartet of thugs in distressed motocross gear circles a wobbly
wino, canes and chains at the ready. After some obligatory grunting and
scraping, the Carl Orff blares and the pulled-punch pummeling begins. Are we
having fun yet?
So goes director Brad Mays' new staging of "A Clockwork
Orange," in which dubious taste and lame fight choreography grapple with
portentous cliches and wildly variable acting styles. Everyone loses in the
bargain, but no one more so than author Anthony Burgess, whose 1962 novel raged
with poisonous, double-edged irony at the excesses of both liberty and
conformity.
Stanley Kubrick's icy, stylized 1971 film missed many of the
novel's nuances, but Mays' muddled rendition is practically nuance-free. Video
screens offer a makeshift phantasmagoria of snuff film, sweaty porn and X-rated
anime; authority figures speechify about the sanctity of free will, as if the
nihilistic violence of our unreliable protagonist, Alex, had no social
dimension at all.
The production's only glimmer of interest is the unlikely casting
of a young woman--boyish, spiky-haired V.C. Smith--as Alex. She's an impish
punk sprite with a hypnotic presence, though her delivery occasionally trips up
on Burgess' tongue-twisting Cockney/Russian dialect, and she has all the
physical menace of a Pokemon. No surprise, then, that the show's best moments
come in the essentially passive second act, as Alex's reconditioning into
"goodness" unspools with a coolly mounting horror.
Still, as a vehicle for Burgess' ideas, let alone most of the talents
assembled, this "Orange" is a lemon.
"A Clockwork
Orange," Ark Theatre Company at the Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura
Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 26. $20. (323)
969-1707. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.