From Picasso's "Guernica," modern art's most famous antiwar painting inspired by the Spanish Civil War, to Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," an epic theatrical event about AIDS, philosophy, and politics set in the 1980s, a single work of art has often provided more trenchant social and political commentary than countless news stories and academic articles.
One recent entry in art's effort to take on a controversial moral issue -- human cloning -- is British dramatist Caryl Churchill's play "A Number," which opened December 7 in New York City after a 2002 London debut and stagings elsewhere since then.Cloning may not yet provoke the same widespread social urgency as wars and pandemics, but this stark, spare play offers a nuanced artistic contribution to the bioethical debates of our time and tries to shed light on an important moral issue whose human dimensions too often become lost in the abstractions of philosophy and arcane scientific knowledge.
"A Number" takes place in an indeterminate future when human cloning is possible. A man in his early 60s, Salter, played by the actor Sam Shepard, is confronted by his son, Bernard, who has discovered that "a number" of genetic replicates of him exist. What follows is not a direct debate about cloning, but rather a meditation -- enacted through elliptical, halting dialogue between Salter and three of his sons, all played by the same actor, Dallas Roberts -- on the nature of human identity and cloning's potential psychological and existential ramifications.
"Cloning is a plot element in this play that allows the playwright to explore the relationships between father and son, parent and child," says Dr. Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics research institute. "This is a play about these interwoven themes primarily, for which cloning is a nice device that the playwright can use to look at different facets of the relationships between parents and children."
Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, found that by packing such heady issues into just 65 minutes, "A Number" demands a lot from its audience. But he noted that the play won't help people understand the science of cloning, and he expressed concern over theatergoers' ability to form opinions without a basic understanding of the process, which has been fraught with problems thus far in animal experimentation and counts no legitimate supporters for human reproductive purposes.
Reproductive cloning involves the same process as therapeutic cloning, or cloning for research: an egg that has been stripped of its DNA is injected with donor body cells and submitted to a chemical bath or electric shock, coaxing it into dividing. If implanted in a woman's uterus, the embryo would develop with the same DNA of the person who donated the body cells, creating a human clone.
Scientists, however, are years away from perfecting the process even for purposes of extracting stem cells, the stage at which therapeutic cloning cuts off embryonic development. Thus far, only researchers in South Korea have successfully performed the procedure to the point of extracting human embryonic stem cells.
More importantly, say several bioethicists, reproductive cloning simply is not an issue of serious debate because of safety concerns. "There's always a danger in these things that cloning looks more doable than it is or ever will be," says Caplan. "The most likely outcome of cloning is physical deformity, while the play is way over on the emotional and psychological side. There is no point in dwelling on cloning in the real world of policy."
Theater, of course, is not the real world, nor does it always concern itself with public policy. But an imaginary drama nonetheless can elucidate the human condition.
"One of my frustrations in the field of bioethics when this gets discussed is that it's kind of arid," says Rebecca Dresser, a professor of law and ethics in medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. "There would be a rich array of psychological and social implications. People's relationships would be affected, and these kinds of effects or implications really require, I think, the literary approach to show us things that are difficult to point out in an academic or legal analysis."
Art, adds Thomas Murray, "can illuminate the human emotions and relationships that are really at the heart of what would make cloning a destructive practice or something that we might just accept. Clearheaded analysis is important, but so is art."
In "A Number," Salter ponders in fragmented dialogue cloning's impact on one's sense of self: "Because what does it do to you, to everything, if there are all these walking around, what it does to me, what am I, and it's not even me it happened to," he wonders.
Cloning a child, says one psychologist, could place undue expectations on the genetic copy to succeed in the same way the original did. "Both genes and the environment make substantial contributions," says Dr. Gary Marcus, associate professor of psychology at New York University. "Thus it's very unlikely that a clone would be an exact copy of the original. He would have not only different talents but he would not be like his brother, just a different person."
But is a parent pushing a daughter to excel at ballet the same as cloning a daughter who does, in fact, excel at ballet? In "A Number," Churchill not only probes what it means to be human; she also explores the motivations behind human reproduction, and whether cloning upends the traditional parent-child relationship by offering the ability to choose genetic makeup.
