YOU WANT TO SLOOSHY?: Eric Blogs on A Clockwork Orange

A real dobby evening to thee and thine!

As we near the two week-til-opening mark, that old familiar feeling sets in. It creeps into my every fiber like a quiet, warm, liquid fog. Like some sort of increasing internal voltage. What was once a theatrical eternity now feels like only a few blinks away. And here we are. A Clockwork Orange. As I sit here and ponder this piece I realize I’ve got 15 days until the play becomes itself.

“Huh?” “The play?” “How can you do that on stage?” “What? I never knew there was a play!” Says person asking about the show.

These are some of the typical knee jerk guffaws and responses I get when doing my damndest to build some buzz for what I believe will be a killer experience of a spectacle. (Seriously. Get your tickets.)

A Clockwork Orange. There’s an entire world to this universe, and slowly but surely I’ve started to notice (much to my dismay) that most folks outside of this world think that this is going to be some sort of eye-liner-clad and singing-in-the-rain-stage-assault of an ultra-violent and horrible-horrible oh most horrible time. With cricket like uniforms.

Thanks, Stanley Kubrick. You made a film so searing and psychologically piercing that no one bothered to pick up the damn book. What was crafted as a beautiful and one of a kind exercise in language and human plight is now clouded up with Kubrick’s overuse of shock value and surface violence. Profound lip shrooms to you, Stanley! PFFFFFFTTTTT!!!

In some but not all seriousness, It didn’t take me long to realize why Burgess soured on Kubrick’s interpretive choices. A Shockwork Orange, anyone? Kubrick’s overuse of pushing the ultra violence through the film medium was all about invoking a response, and less about being integral to the novel. While the story telling is there and the film certainly has some redeeming ties to the novel, it’s obvious why Burgess in part felt some need to create his own visual adaptation. (Apparently Kubrick wasn’t even interested in picking Burgess’s brain prior to filming. What an ass, I would’ve soured on the guy, too.)

So without hand feeding you too many spoilers… forget the film. It’s overrated, anyways. Kiss your flat block marina scene goodbye, forget the boa constrictor in Alex’s drawer (remember that?) disregard Mr. Deltoid’s crotch grab and the ever so iconic Kubrick stare. We aren’t doing that shit. My most sincere appy-polly loggies to ya.

So what are we doing you ask? What will you be sitting down to viddy (see) in two weeks? I believe that we are celebrating this story and giving it life in a way Anthony Burgess would have preferred, with beautiful composition and tact. It seems that Burgess dreamt up a walking, running, dance-fighting and tolchocking beast of an energy factory in response to Kubrick’s one-note tactics.

While Kubrick did his best to push the ultra violence and testosterone driven madness into our brains and faces through a means of shock; Burgess responded by injecting the beauty that was most apparently missing from the film into his own visual adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. And for Burgess all the whole knowing his own universe so well, it surely had to be a daunting task for the playwright.

This piece is the definition of ensemble driven. If the nine of us aren’t panting like dogs by the end of it than we certainly aren’t going to make Burgess very proud. Or you.

I’m pretty damn proud of everyone that came together to get this thing on its feet.

See you out there, rightiright?

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