Being Defiant Theater's swan song, A Clockwork Orange can be seen as a metaphor for the group's 10-year history. With most of Defiant's cast already moved on, this production had some new-comers -- particularly Jarrett Sleeper, who plays Alex, the story's main character. But besides this young exception, Defiant is now like that last part of the play. Where before they were the young, violent and shocking Alex, they are now the reformed and settled-down Alex, who has grown up, married, has kids and holds a job. This personal meaning aside, seeing A Clockwork Orange with an audience (if you haven't already, at the stage or movies) is insightful in that if offers the chance to see how others interpret and react to the controversial story. Hearing some audience members blithely chuckling-up the "ultra-violence" can be somewhat disturbing, even though Defiant's sense of facetiousness still manages to creep into the production. But the show was more violent (it almost caused Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss to walk out in the first act) than it was, in any way, funny, making it seem that some of the story's politically and socially-charged meanings were lost on (at least some) of the audience.
But the story, while still no match to the advantages of the Stanley Kubrick film's awesome mise en scene and soundtrack -- was played out well on the stage. Most of what was in the film is here, even Alex's violent-montage daydream is translated as giant dragon puppets, grim reapers, warriors battling, AK47-toting scarfaces, and so on, that, due to the power of the young droog's vulgar imagination, are physically -- and comically -- exhausted by the reverie's end. Some of the psychedelic Beethoven heard in the film is psychedelic here too, but more often the soundtrack samples pop culture: German heavy-metal group Rammstein, New Order's "Blue Monday," The Beatles' "Across the Universe," Metallica, and snippets that sound like they could be from Bernard Herrmann's score for "Psycho."
The only complaint is that the arcane Burgess dialogue doesn't snap. The actors seem foreign to the dialogue instead of well-accustomed to it, as their characters should be. But in the end, such complaints are petty for a strong production by a group who have certainly left their mark on Chicago storefront theater.
