What’s the right price for KCAT’s strong reading of A Number?

If you picked up the script today, A Number, a nimble one-act by English playwright and reigning dialogue queen Caryl Churchill, might feel dated. The play’s conceit, human cloning, has cooled somewhat from its early aughts firestorm (Dolly the sheep! Eve the hoax baby!).

But the Kansas City Actors Theatre, directed by Mark Robbins, finds universal appeal in a well-acted production exploring the dangerous marriage of intellectual ambition and emotional thirst.

The play opens at the dining table of an aging Salter (Gary Neal Johnson), who is wrestling with the discovery that his adult son, Bernard (Mathew Joseph Schmidli), has “a number” — vagueness intentional — of clones.

Bernard probes his father with feigned detachment, trying to suss out whether he’s the progenitor or a clone himself. But Salter bucks the question. “I wonder if we can sue,” he muses in a distinctly American tone.

This is heavy stuff, but Churchill’s touch is feather-light. I’ve long admired the playwright’s knack for mapping the circuitous routes we take through conversations, sliding sideways into points to conceal our intentions. A Number‘s two-person scenes show that skill at its sharpest, elevating simple exchanges to conversational chess.

They also provide a fine showcase for two local actors at the top of their game.

Schmidli convincingly inhabits both Salter’s biological son and a clone “birthed” to replace him. The play’s structure demands that Schmidli pingpong from Bernard 1, a flawed son with a violent temper and a lowslung gait, to Bernard 2, a shelf-stable, handwringing everyman, in back-to-back scenes. In Schmidli’s care, we’re never confused.

Schmidli takes the stage again in the final scene as Michael, a man with the temperament and inner life of a labrador retriever. The three performances are so distinct, I began to suspect a cast of Schmidli clones.

Johnson is no less changeable as Salter, a pathological liar with a hunger for truth. Sometimes here, we see glints of regret and sincerity; at other moments, calculated manipulation. Johnson allows the characters’ internal contradictions to bleed messily through in conversations laced with interruptions and deflections that land with the force of blows. His work in the final scene is a mesmerizing emotional tightrope act.

As the play progresses and desperation mounts, the two communicate in increasingly tangled tautologies. “You are you because that’s who you are,” a beleaguered Salter tells Bernard 2. Bernard 1 reflects it back: “If you tried harder, you’d have been different from what you were like.”

It’s a style that could frustrate in shakier hands, but Schmidli and Johnson are masters of the form, revealing more with their hesitations than they do with their answers.

KCAT is one of a handful of local companies without a permanent address, and for this show it’s squatting at Rockhurst University’s Mabee Theater. Still, Robbins and his team have achieved a polished look with minimal design elements. Shane Rowse’s lights define the stage with tight honeycomb cells and recognizable sci-fi colors, and Tim Rothwell’s set employs clever hexagonal reflectors to play with light and add structure to the bare space.

Robbins deserves credit both for vision and for the show’s taut pacing, though a few directing hiccups remain. The blocking in the living room scenes often dissolves into tentative circles, and the lighting dips and pulses at strange intervals to unclear effect.

These are minor quibbles, but worth noting in light of another significant number: the ticket cost. At $40 a pop, this may be the priciest one-act I’ve attended. And for a two-actor show with a minimalist design, that cost may be hard for less-flush fans to swallow.

Whinging about ticket cost is always uncomfortable. Artists deserve good pay for good work, and companies without the corporate sponsors of, say, the KC Rep need all the help they can get. But audience members have budgets of their own, which must be divided among plenty of good theater.

At a lower price point, A Number would be must-see. But unless you can score a discount ticket, there are others right now I’d see first.