CHILDE BYRON, Stone Circle Theatre Ensemble, at Profiles Theatre. If anyone ever puts out an interactive CD-ROM chronicling the life of Lord Byron, it might turn out very much like Romulus Linney’s play. A series of discrete, overanimated scenes show Byron squirming under the thumb of his overbearing mother, impregnating his sister, sodomizing his pregnant wife, and generally flipping 19th-century British morality the bird. Trouble is, escapades don’t add up to a life, let alone drama. It seems Linney raided several encyclopedias and strung up the naughty bits like laundry on a line. He tries to add psychological and emotional complexity through the character of Byron’s daughter Ada, a hyperrational, terminally ill mathematician who sets the play in motion by summoning the spirit of her deceased hyper-Romantic father. But Ada’s professed need to understand the father she never knew seems academic–and in any case Linney drops the Ada-as-medium convention halfway through the play.
