Cloud Nine
Wed Jul 12, 8:00 PM - Sun Jul 23, 4:00 PM

Churchill likes to mix things up get rid of any preconceived notions about gender, sexuality, romance, or “lifestyle!” Cloud Nine mocks colonial and sexual repressions in a farce that employs racial and gender cross-casting to make its points.

Think of it as Monty Python meets a Women and Gender Studies doctoral dissertation with a healthy dose of Brecht’s Epic Theater thrown in for good measure. Caryl Churchill sets in motion characters whose sexual identities and alliances shift constantly. She asks audiences to accept that most of the characters make an impossible leap in time, from colonial Africa in the Victorian age to contemporary Britain. She then asks audiences to ignore the fact that certain men are played by women, certain women are played by men, children can be played by adults and that even black can be white.

Churchill has become well known for her unique use of dramatic structure, often overshadowing the context of her works. She is a playwright of ideas with her primary concern being the individual’s struggle to emerge from the ensnarements of culture, class, economic systems and the imperatives of the past. Not surprisingly for a contemporary female writer, she primarily employs female characters to deal with such themes. In Cloud Nine, a parallel is suggested between Western colonial oppression and Western sexual oppression. This oppression is seen first in the family structure, then in the power of the past to influence the present.

No one in Cloud Nine can successfully escape from the ghosts of established practices and traditions. Act I presents an English family living in 1879 Victorian colonial Africa. Clive, the father, is not only father to his children, but to the natives as well. To underscore this male-influenced world, Churchill uses a male actor to portray Clive’s wife Betty, since the