Word: salter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Start with that first number: two. Two actors, but four characters: a man in his early 60s, Salter (Gambon), and three of his sons (all played by Daniel Craig). We are in the near future - say, the middle of this century. Thirty-some years before, Salter's wife had died and he was left to raise his four-year-old son Bernard, who had begun life as an angel ("You were the most beautiful baby everyone said"). But the father was neglectful, sometimes brutal to the boy; Bernard grew wild, sick. In anger and cunning, Salter took advantage...
...imagine Steven de Souza or some other Hollywood scribe hearing of "A Number" and drooling over the exploitation possibilities. But Churchill is less interested in the garish colors of melodrama than the shadings of personality. In Salter, the joy of early parenthood turns bitter and abusive when his wife killed herself and he is left with dreams of killing his own son by reproducing him. In the nice Bernard, revelation upends an ordinary life: however hard it is to learn you were adopted, it must be - given the double-time march of science it certainly will be - harder to learn...
...learn this in the first two of the play's five scenes: conversations between Salter and the decent, cloned Bernard (B2), then Salter and his still-troubled birth son (B1). The "action" takes place off stage, but it's shocking nonetheless. Pin this: B1 visits B2 and threatens him; B2 flees to a distant island, where B1 finds and murders him; B1 confronts his father, who now fears he will track down all the Bernards and become a serial killer of his own clones - mass murder as mass suicide. But B1's only further victim is himself. In the last...
...additions Luke Ruscoe; Ben Logan; Andrew Salter; Saul McDonald...
...BELTWAY BOOKS: On October 1, Random House will publish "Worth the Fighting For," a memoir by John McCain with Mark Salter. The book, a continuation of his bestselling "Faith of My Fathers," follows McCain from the Navy to his run for the presidency...