Theater review: ‘A Number’ asks what makes us who we are

There is something fitting about Bart Guingona as the father in Caryl Churchill’s “A Number” in 2026. When the play premiered in 2002, he might have been a shoo-in to play the cloned sons in this spare, speculative drama about human cloning. More than two decades later, he has arrived at the age of Salter, the father at the center of the story, with JC Santos playing not just one son but three.

The casting gives the production an interesting dynamic even before the play begins. Guingona and Santos previously appeared together in “Red,” but this time Santos is the one directing, making “A Number” his directorial debut. Guingona has said he left Santos to stage the play without interference, and the result suggests that the younger actor has a good grasp of both the material and the demands of the stage.

Presented at WHYNoT, a gallery and retail space in the upscale Karrivin Plaza in Makati, the production benefits from an intimate, theater-in-the-round arrangement. Guingona staged his one-man show “Via Dolorosa,” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the same venue last year. Once again, the unconventional space proves an effective setting for a work that depends less on spectacle than on the tension between people forced to confront uncomfortable truths.

“A Number” is also the third science-themed play to reach Manila audiences this year, following Barefoot Theater Collaborative’s “Anthropology,” about artificial intelligence and grief, and CAST PH’s “The Effect,” which explores mental health and an experimental antidepressant. Churchill’s play is the oldest of the three, having been written in the wake of Dolly the sheep’s cloning in 1996, but it may be the one whose questions feel most unsettlingly familiar.

The science remains speculative when it comes to reproductive human cloning. The human implications, however, are anything but.

Salter has allowed his son to be cloned, after his wife died. As the play unfolds across five scenes, he encounters the young men who force him to reckon with that decision. One of them discovers that he is a clone; another is the original son, who had been given up for adoption. In all, the title refers to 19 clones.

With only two actors onstage for a little over an hour, Churchill builds a drama that is as much about what remains unsaid as what is revealed.

The premise might suggest a conventional science-fiction thriller, but “A Number” is interested in something much more intimate. What happens when the biological relationship between parent and child becomes a matter of deliberate reproduction? If two people share the same genetic makeup, should they be expected to share the same identity? And if they turn out differently, what does that say about the people and circumstances that shaped them?

These are questions about nature versus nurture, but also about guilt, responsibility and the ways parents fail their children. The play’s most unsettling possibility is that someone with exactly the same genetic structure as another person can grow up differently — perhaps even better — simply because the circumstances of his upbringing were different.

In other words, DNA is not destiny. Nor can it absolve parents of responsibility for the people their children become.

Churchill’s dialogue is terse, sometimes halting, with characters circling around thoughts they struggle to articulate. The exchanges can feel fragmented, but beneath the pauses and repetitions is a dense search for meaning. The characters are not simply trying to understand the science behind their existence. They are trying to understand themselves, and what their existence means to the people who brought them into the world.

The production’s visual language reinforces this search for identity without overwhelming it. Unlike “Anthropology” and “The Effect,” which leaned into a sterile, almost otherworldly science-fiction aesthetic, “A Number” has a more intimate, domestic feel. A lounge chair is moved around the space to suggest different locations, while two mirrored corridors serve as entrances and exits.

Above the performers, screens display close-up images of human DNA. The images function as both lighting elements and conceptual art, underscoring the play’s preoccupation with genetic identity. The mirrors, meanwhile, multiply Santos’s reflections, offering a simple but effective visual metaphor for the different versions of the self.

It is an elegant solution to a production-design challenge: how to represent cloning onstage without turning the play into a technological spectacle. The design, combined with an evocative sound score, makes the most of the venue while leaving the actors and Churchill’s writing at the center.

The performances are what ultimately make the production work.

It takes some adjustment to see Guingona as a man in his 60s. For those who have followed his theater career, he has long been associated with the intellectual, angry young man — forceful, articulate and ready for confrontation. Here, he must inhabit someone considerably more frail, a man who stutters, loses his train of thought and seems increasingly unable to defend the choices he has made.

Guingona handles the transformation with impressive restraint. His Salter is not simply a father trying to explain himself; he is a lonely man whose explanations seem to collapse under the weight of his own guilt. There is something affecting about watching an actor known for his intensity portray someone who can no longer command a room or even find the right words to make himself understood.

Santos, meanwhile, continues to demonstrate why he is one of the more compelling actors of his generation. He has moved from Lam-ang to a depressed, grief-stricken artist in “3 Upuan,” and now to three characters who are genetically identical but have grown into different people.

The achievement is not merely that he makes the three men distinguishable. It is that he gives each a distinct personality and physical presence, making their differences feel like the product of lived experience rather than a theatrical trick. The changes are accomplished with remarkable economy, sometimes through little more than a shift in costume or demeanor.

That Santos can deliver these performances while directing the production is particularly impressive. His staging is controlled without feeling static, and the mirrored corridors become more than an attractive design element: they embody the play’s central question of how many versions of a person can exist, and whether any of them can be considered the original.

For all its speculative trappings, “A Number” ultimately brings the discussion back to something painfully recognizable: the relationship between parents and children. The people we become are shaped by more than the biological material we inherit, and the people who raise us cannot escape their responsibility. That is what makes Churchill’s play more than a period piece from the early 2000s. The questions it raises about identity, parenting and the consequences of our choices remain urgent.

“A Number” runs for only two weekends, and an extension would be welcome. It is not an easy sell, but for audiences who value works that provoke thought as much as it engages the emotions, this production offers a compelling hour of theater.