It's all about sex. Even when we think it's about Queen and Country. Or family values. Or power. Or money. It's really about sex, and a delightfully ribald revival of Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine by the Atlantic Theatre Company makes the case.
Churchill has been one of the most iconoclastic writers in the English theater over the past half century, pillorying the hypocrisies of society with acerbic wit and humor and uncanny insight with plays like Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, to name just a few.
And if there has been a greater acceptance of sexual equality over the years, a large amount of credit goes to writers like Churchill and plays such as Cloud Nine. Should one be tempted to think that present-day openness on sexual matters makes the play irrelevant they should ask Kim Davis her opinion on the subject.
The phrase "cloud nine" was once a familiar euphemism for a state of bliss, though there is little that could be described as bliss for the frustrated characters in Churchill's play.
The action is divided in two parts and eras. The opening act takes place in an unspecified African country during the reign of Queen Victoria. The second fast forwards to 1979 London, though for the characters only 25 years have elapsed.
If that sounds confusing, it gets further complicated as the same characters, with men playing some women's roles and women playing men, try to sort out their sexuality in the face of changing attitudes.
We first meet Clive, who carries the Union Jack and Victorian values on his sleeve. He lives in a small corner of the empire on which the sun never sets with his dutiful wife Betty and two children -- a boy named Edward and a baby girl named Vicky -- his mother-in-law, and a nanny, with a faithful native servant, Joshua, to fetch for them. They are soon joined by Mrs. Saunders, a widowed neighbor, and Harry, an explorer of sorts who is Clive's best friend.
They have picnics, toss a cricket ball around, drink tea and sundowners, toast the Queen, sing hymns and have Christmas crackers at Yuletide. There may be a spot of trouble with the natives, but a good flogging can restore order. If, however, as Clive says, "the Empire is one big family," it is an incestuous one.
Behind that façade of Victorian propriety, young Edward likes to play with Vicky's doll and dreams of stabbing crocodiles; Betty fantasizes a romance with Harry, who writes her poems but has trysts with Joshua in the barn and plays naughty games with Edward; the nanny lusts after Betty; and Clive is having impassioned sex with Mrs. Saunders, during the throes of which one can only imagine him humming "Land of Hope and Glory."
By 1979, Edward is out of the closet and trying to domesticate Gerry, a promiscuous gay man he met at a steam bath. Baby Vicky is now a mom of her own, married to a stereotypical male chauvinist and is attracted to Lin, an openly Lesbian mom she meets in the park, though she doesn't want to admit it. And Betty is divorcing Clive and discovering her own sexuality.
The play is a challenge for actors, who not only alter roles between acts, but often change gender as well. James Macdonald, a frequent collaborator with Churchill, has put together a first-rate cast that doesn't miss a nuance in the play.
Brooke Bloom and Chris Perfetti switch roles as mother and son -- Bloom is young Edward in Africa and Betty in London, while Perfetti is Betty in Africa and the grown-up Edward in London -- and each has a spotlight turn. Bloom's second-act monologue on the discovery of masturbation is a gem.
Izzie Steele, who does double duty in Africa as the nanny and Mrs. Saunders, brings a crusading anti-male fire to Lin in the second act. Clarke Thorell, who makes Clive's Victorian platitudes sound noble and patriotic, is wonderfully bratty as Lin's 2-year-old daughter Kathy in the second.
Sean Dugan is inscrutable as the native servant Joshua and uninhibited as Edward's cruiser of a boyfriend in the second (a scene in which the newly liberated Betty tries to pick him up is delightful). John Sanders is the epitome of hypocritical duplicity as Harry, feeding Betty's fantasies while indulging in pedophilia with Edward between assignations with Joshua. And Lucy Owen is the model of a straight-laced Victorian as the mother-in-law and credibly indecisive as the grown-up Vicky.