In steampunk, everything is familiar but rearranged. The same is true of The Clockwork Professor, a world premiere by Maggie Lee presented by Pork Filled Productions (at Theatre Off Jackson through August 3). The result is a frivolous diversion, making for pleasant, well-meaning entertainment.
Lee draws on major steampunk tropes familiar to readers of works such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. The Clockwork Professor’s world is justified by parallel universes (which inevitably entangle), dominated by a desperate fascist state, and driven by rival engineers who create impossible magical machines. Lee’s flights of fantasy remain at low altitude, though, rooted in our contemporary world as Roombas gone wrong and human cloning take prominent places in the plot.
The eponymous engineer of this story is one Professor Seamus Pemberton (Brad Walker) who melodramatically suffers a pair of torments (because steampunk theatre apparently reworks Victorian dramatics as well as aesthetics). The greatest of these is his unexpressed love for this assistant, Matilda (Natea Kang), though he also carries secrets that might drive her from him.
Pemberton’s worries soon escalate as a pair of clients arrives (Karissa Samples and Sascha Streckel), with an offer he can’t refuse. The clients are in fact robots acting under orders of the Crown.
In order to preserve the monarchy following an assassination, Dr. Higgins (Phillip Keiman) has stashed clones in alternate universes. However his portal key is broken and only Dr. Pemberton can fix and operate it. He does so, opening a door to our universe. The robots extract a clone named Sophie (Ana Maria Campoy) but her keeper, Jin (Moses Yim), who has fallen in love with her, follows through the portal to her rescue. Pemberton, Matilda, and their daffy friend, Lawrence (Randal Brammer) aid Jin and all ends well. A radio announcer (Melissa Slaughter) oversees the story with some clever shadow puppetry and sound design.
As a largely materialist movement, a steampunk production must give central focus to props and costumes. Samantha Armitage’s costumes feel higher budget than the rest of this production. She hits all the major requirements with bowlers, lots of leather, and a dagger-handled cane all in an earth-tone palette.
Robin McCartney’s props achieve less but create a third layer of technology with pieces that are obviously of our time. A key prop appears to consist of an LED fixture set into a speaker diaphragm. While the piece as a whole lacks the polish or dull gilt of the steampunk aesthetic, this third layer suggests a fruitful approach. One wonders how a more consistent application of such an approach would have played.
There are some minor unforced script errors in the logic of cross-dimension travelers and some consistently odd acting choices that suggest directorial weakness from Amy Poisson. For all the fun of and whimsy, there’s an amateurish tendency to establish power by shouting and to shout louder for emphasis. There are also frequent blocking problems for both sightlines and naturalness of crosses. (The pacing feels especially steampunk as it lumbers along laboriously with occasional bursts of laser sharpness.)
There’s potential for depth in this show and Lee contributes some valuable questions to the contemporary existential concerns relating to human cloning. But, for better or for worse, this intellectual side is glazed over, useful for motivation more than contemplation. While Lee’s characters raise the question of how a clone feels about her identity, the script diminishes its importance.
In art we tend to look for the evolution, the mutation, the recombination that is definably new, but The Clockwork Professor reminds us of the value in consistency and the rewards of the predictable.