A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Closely following the 1962 novel, Burgess’s script details the adventures of a 15-year-old punk named Alex who leads his “droogs” (comrades) in nightly escapades of aimless vandalism, robbery, assault, and rape. The prototype of the alienated adolescent, Alex is no dispossessed ghetto kid but the product of a respectable middle-class upbringing: out-of-touch parents, an irrelevant and ineffectual educational system, an impotent social-welfare structure, and a political establishment whose liberal and reactionary wings are equally well suited to screwing up the people they’re supposed to serve. Imprisoned after he’s killed an old woman who had the temerity to fight back, Alex is chosen to test a new scientific method of rehabilitation–an aversion-therapy treatment in which he’s injected with drugs that produce pain and nausea while he watches films of violence. Turned into “a perfect Christian,” the newly submissive Alex is disinclined not only to perpetrate crime but to protect himself from it, leaving him vulnerable to attacks by his former victims. Elevated to celebrity status, Alex becomes a pawn in the struggle between adherents of social control and proponents of free will–call them the ultimate prochoice activists–whose Catholic-inspired position (representing Burgess’s own) is that goodness must be chosen, not conditioned.
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Surrounding Freeman is a mostly anonymous ensemble who seem swallowed up by designer Robert Brill’s sprawling urban-wasteland set, which undermines the show’s intended grittiness with its obvious expensiveness–a perennial problem at Steppenwolf. (The soil that covers the stage is probably worth a few months’ rent at the housing projects a few blocks from the theater.) Looking like leftovers from an Adam and the Ants costume party in their Laura Cunningham-designed duds, Alex and his droogs hang out at a druggy milk bar in which a dead cow hangs from the ceiling, her udders connected to a fountain of cream; it all looks like a Halloween theme party at the old Medusa’s, where white-bread suburbanites used to go to slum through their futuristic fantasies. Mechanical in every sense of the word, this Clockwork Orange represents more tellingly than intended Burgess’s concerns about technology swallowing up the human spirit.
