Review: Cloud 9 by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs

Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine is a gender bender and a time twister, a sly comic look at sex and sexual roles in the Victorian British Empire and in the contemporary United Kingdom.  One of the many clever twists of the piece, the fruit of some intensive workshopping with actors, is that seventy-five years pass between the two acts but the characters age only thirty years.  Churchill explained that that arose from the fact that her 1970's contemporaries felt that their own sexual roles were shaped by the standards of Victorian England.

 

Some of the results are predictable -- males with flaring nostrils and surging sexual drives in colonial Africa, a devotion to good Queen Victoria, women dutiful yet unfulfilled, and the modern confusions about marriage, sexuality and child-rearing.  Others are anything but predictable: notably the cross-gender casting in both worlds, which directly raises the issues of roles, gender roles, play and role-play.

 

Add to that the audacious transformations of the seven-member cast. Robert Frost as manly Clive, master of the mansion, the family and the natives in deepest darkest Africa in Act I, becomes the impetuous and spoiled seven-year-old Cathyin Act II.  Chris Weihert, who in conscientious drag plays Clive's pining wife Betty in the first part, becomes Vicki's miffed, well meaning husband in the second.  Jessica Hughes slips a full generation with the ease of a firefighter dropping down the fire pole in response to a three-alarm fire:  sniffy traditional mother Maud living with her daughter Betty and family in an increasingly menacing Africa, and then Betty herself, now in her sixties, divorced, alone and slowly awakening to her own long-neglected body.

 

I saw this piece for the first time at St. Ed's exactly three years ago and it bowled me over.  This production at Southwestern directed by Christi J. Moore featured a gifted and attractive young cast, but Moore appears to have decided that the first act was to be played with Monty Python exaggeration, harrumhping and idiocy.  (Full disclosure:  I spent twelve years on assignments in Africa, and my understanding of colonialism, isolation and attendant tensions doesn't contain much room for ridicule.)  As Clive the master with the civilizing mission, Robert Frost was LOUD and obvious throughout.  Weihert's turn as Betty was deftly done but was immediately upstaged by the feminine authenticity of Kristi Brawner.  Brawner was the moody, voluptuous Mrs. Saunders who took refuge with the family and had to endure Clive's slavvering and screwing.

 

Act II is played much more subtly and is that much more enjoyable.  Women of the cast have both the seductive appeal of deep feeling and that of youth.  Brawner is again unhappy but this time she finds reward in neither man nor woman; Rachel Hoover is sensitive and fetching both as Act I's hero-worshipping, doll-obsessed boy Edward and as Lin, the lesbian single mom who takes Vicki (Brawner) in.  Jessica Hughes, with her expressive eyes, serene delivery and emotional depth as divorced Betty, simply squeezes your heart.

 

Chase Brewer has the greatest apparent stretch between acts, and he takes it with ease.  He's Joshua the 'black' servant in Act I, turbaned, rigidly obsequious and yet menacing; and in Act II he's Vicki's brother Edward, sexually confused, at loose ends in his day job as the park gardener, enamored of tough guy Gerry (Adrian Gonzalez) but wondering whether by nature he's really a woman -- and a lesbian at that.

 

The cast's British accents were uniformly good, thanks in part to coaching credited to Kathleen Juhl, and sound design is appropriate (pre-show Gilbert and Sullivan alternating with patriotic marches and some 70's pop at the intermission).  The cast delivered a stamping march and chorus in their colonial African days and a lovely set of harmonies in 70's England.  Each was a bit extraneous to the plot, but no one minded that.

 

Southwestern has a strange habit of providing its dramaturgy not in the program but on posters in the dim walkway between the exterior doors and the theatre.  They were appropriate and informative, offering food for thought concerning the context of this curious confection.  Almost no one stopped to read them.

 

EXTRA

Click to view the program for Southwestern's Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill.

 

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Cloud 9
by Caryl Churchill
Southwestern University