When you fail as a dad so you clone your son and start over

An interpersonal puzzle play as much as a riff on the ethics and morality of cloning, Churchill’s 2002 drama arrived in London just a few years after Dolly the sheep made her debut as history’s first cloned mammal, with a little-known Daniel Craig playing the son. The story unfolds haltingly, in fragments, as Salter (D.C.-based veteran David Bryan Jackson) reluctantly coughs up details about what happened and why, under the not-terribly-focused questioning of his perplexed offspring. In a new staging in Arlington, Va., from Edge of the Universe Theater, the latter is played by Max Jackson — and yes, the two men are real-life father and son.

What would make a parent do such a thing? How badly would he have had to mess things up? (Cue references to alcohol and maybe drugs, among darker hints of abuse and neglect.) What befell the original Bernard? (The answer will prove more shocking than most will expect.) Where was Mom in all this?

Oh, and what to do about the 19 extra clones the doctors turn out to have created — without Salter’s knowledge or permission, it seems — to study in the name of science? To whom do they “belong,” and isn’t there anyone to sue?

All this, remarkably, is packed into a brisk hour of dialogue as broken and sharp-edged as shattered glass, its stutters and stops and overlaps navigated crisply by the Jacksons under the coaching of director Stephen Jarrett; their circlings and collisions play out on a simple kitchen-table set (courtesy Simone Schneeberg) surrounded by a yawning black-box void that seems to close in claustrophobically in particularly fraught moments. (The deceptively simple but unmistakably powerful lighting is by Hailey LaRoe, with unfussy character-defining costumes from Lauren K. Lambie.)

For all the play’s brevity and the production’s simplicity, “A Number” somehow makes room for an anguished investigation into the nature-nurture metaphysics of the situation as well: Who am I, Bernard 2 wonders, if there was — is — another me wandering the London pavements? What makes me the individual I am? How and why am I different from Bernard 1 — so broken a thing that our father would think to start all over again — and what does it mean that the man who’s been a decent parent to me was a massive failure to my forebear? And the most anguished question of all: How am I implicated in all this?

Churchill, among the fiercest and boldest of Britain’s modern playwrights, goes nearly as hard about identity in “A Number” as she’s gone in other plays about sociopolitical upheavals (“Mad Forest” and “Far Away”) and sexual politics (“Cloud 9” and most famously “Top Girls”) — big-swing, big-think exercises all of them, none as interested in providing answers as suggesting the endless complications involved in opening the questions. “He who learns must suffer,” Aeschylus is supposed to have said, and certainly Churchill knows that the process of poking about among these uncertainties can unearth no end of pain.

Salter and Bernard will suffer, to be sure, as their not-quite-shared past insinuates itself more insistently into their increasingly complicated present. We frail, fallible mortals talk sometimes about leaving our yesterdays behind, especially when we’ve been brave enough to take a break and pull out a fresh slate. But while it’s true we can only start where we stand and work forward, the ultimately tragic “A Number” suggests there are some burdens that can’t ever be entirely laid down.

A Number, through Sept. 1 at Gunston Arts Center Theatre II in Arlington, Va. About 1 hour without intermission. edgeuniversetheater.org.