Word: salters
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...Malcolm S. Salter ’62, James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration...
...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...
...This is the old evil-twin story, a gene-spliced Genesis, where Cain and Abel are closer than brothers. "You remind me of him," Salter says to the good Bernard, who replies, "I remind me of him. We both hate you." And where Adam, or God, is the villain, for siring an Abel whose goodness tortures Cain. (Perhaps Eve was cloned in the Garden of Eden; otherwise, where did Cain and Abel find their wives?) Salter, I guess, is Adam, and Abraham too, betrayed by the gods to whom he handed over his child - not to be killed...
...Salter, like any liberal villain, has his reasons. As he explains to the first Bernard: "I spared you, though you were this disgusting thing by then; anyone in their right mind would have squashed you; but I remembered what you'd been like at the beginning and I spared you. I didn't want a different one, I wanted that again because you were perfect just like that, and I loved you." To the new, good Bernard, Salter was, by his lights, a good father; he had the chance to dote on his son instead of locking...