At the end of the Christopher William Johnson’s long, free-wheeling adaptation of “A Clockwork Orange” — which has not much to do with Anthony Burgess and everything to do with the departing Defiant Theatre’s sense of legacy — a newly civilized and desensitized Little Alex encounters one of his old “droogs.”
The guy has gone soft. He’s married. Worse, he has a proper job now — at “State Insurance.” At the end of the show, he wanders off sadly — but inevitably — into the sunset.
Anyone who’s been watching the distinctive theatrical work of Defiant — the original bad boys and girls of the off-Loop — over these last 10 years quickly gets Johnson’s meta-point. Defiant is over. “A Clockwork Orange” is the company’s last show. The original people have gone soft, gotten married, acquired proper jobs. You can’t keep churning out the old ultra-violence, as Alex would say, on a shoestring in those circumstances.
In “Clockwork Orange,” they cut away Alex’s violence and lobotomize his cultural heart in the process. Defiant doesn’t have a wacky psychiatrist to blame, but it has suffered the same fate. Perchance it happens to us all.
It’s a measure of Johnson’s compositional brilliance, of course, that he managed to come up with so apt a metaphor for this moment. And it’s enough to make you wish that he still had all his old pals around him to play it out.
But although a couple of the old Defiant types shake it up one last time here, they mostly are already gone. In their place are some very young actors who jump around with enthusiasm, but who struggle mightily with Burgess’ distinctive language.
And because “Clockwork Orange” is a piece that requires a certain relish with the weirdly written word, that gives this show a flaw that’s constantly irritating, if not fatal. In the mouth of actors such as Jarrett Sleeper, who plays Alex with emotion but no verbosity, Burgess’ words just don’t pop.
But before Johnson, who adapted and directed, ends on that aforementioned note of self-aware sentimentality, he fires plenty of rounds of his grand old defiance. And there’s more than enough here to remind us of why we’ll miss this historically important theater company.
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Unlike many of the troupe’s seeming successors who are essentially aesthetic experimenters — such as the Hypocrites or the House Theatre — Defiant always engaged with ideology. Angrily. And despite the essentially apolitical nature of the original novel, this “Clockwork Orange” drips with political fight. Alex and the Droogs here are reconfigured to act like American neo-con thugs let loose in a multinationalist world — kicking people in the head as they sing the national anthem, breaking down old alliances, breeding new violence, changing the rules of engagement. It’s not the point of the original text, but it’s executed with the kind of creative passion we rarely see in town these days.
The show — which is superbly designed in all areas — also is full of the kind of handmade visual tricks that recall such past Defiant causes celebres as “Action Movie.” One moment in particular — a huge visualization of what Alex is seeing in this world of video violence — is so spectacular, you start to seriously lament what is ending here. For this and other reasons — and for a sense of closure — fans of Defiant shouldn’t miss this show.
Still, it’s the ideas that have all the intensity, not the execution. With a couple of exceptions, the overly enthusiastic acting doesn’t even come close to the raw, emotional intensity of this troupe’s glory days. In a perverse way, that’s the way it should be.
One suspects Johnson tried to get the new people to go to that old place — but realized that times have changed.
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“A Clockwork Orange”
When: Through Oct. 16
Where: Storefront Theatre, 66 E. Randolph St.
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $15 at 312-742-8497