‘Clone’ Is Not Original

With his previous “The Adjustment,” playwright Michael T. Folie was the kind of writer who turned left just when you expected him to turn right.

Folie’s taste for the unexpected, along with a mordant sense of humor, continues in his one-act, “Clone,” at the Aaah! Capella Theatre.

What doesn’t carry over from “The Adjustment” is Folie’s sense of devious plotting and memorable scenes, and he isn’t served well by an awkward, unconvincing staging by director Michael Cullen. As the title hints, Folie’s piece is science fiction, and it adds only further evidence to the case that theater and science fiction are extremely problematic bedfellows.

Set in 2106 in the mansion of a dying 136-year-old multimillionaire named Ron Dowling (Joe Reale), “Clone” sets up a future world--sometimes through ham-fisted expository dialogue--in which new generations of individuals either live privileged lives as clones or, if they are poor, as “naturals” or mere mortals.

Much older, wealthy folks such as Ron have been kept alive with the aid of “life brokers,” such as Sugar (Stacey Klass). The problem is that Ron’s time seems to be running out, and since he’s Sugar’s last client, she needs to come up with a way to keep her business going.

Her solution is to connect Ron--and thus keep him as a client--with a goofy-looking contraption that will transmit Ron’s brain patterns, behavior, memories and personality into his Clone (Steve Oreste), which Sugar has conveniently prepared ahead of time. Observing all of this is Ron’s sweet, mechanical female robot-servant named, inexplicably, Jeeves (Karen Kawolics).

Unlike “The Adjustment,” almost nothing in “Clone” surprises, down to the ways in which the Clone is depicted as a mean, self-centered brute--actually, a copy of Ron when he was a bad guy at 25--and the ways in which future technology is generally inhuman and awful, bringing out people’s worst characteristics. Besides the numbingly uninteresting storytelling, what rankles most about “Clone” is the feeling that Folie thinks he has come up with some fresh science-fiction ideas, when in fact his dystopian future is almost antique by genre standards.

While Oreste does some keen physical work as Clone trying to get used to his new body, his personality is already too human and selfish to suggest an artificial life.

Despite his gruff voice and wheelchair, Reale doesn’t come off anywhere close to 136 years old and isn’t as ironically funny as Folie might want him to be. In a role requiring a commanding presence, Klass doesn’t have it, and Kawolics needs to work on her automaton voice and movement.

Theater’s rare and typically unsuccessful forays into science fiction are uniformly pessimistic. “Clone” is no exception, and would have benefited from going down the less-traveled road. No unconvincing “happy” ending changes that.

BE THERE

“Clone,” Aaah! Capella Theatre, 5907 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1:30 p.m. Ends July 31. $8-$12. (818) 986-4668. Running time: 50 minutes.