Wilma's 'Cloud Nine'

Memo to the Wilma:
The polymorphous perverse is no longer news

ROBERT ZALLER

Caryl Churchill enjoys a following in Philadelphia. Joanna Rotte of Villanova University has been a tireless promoter of her works, and the Wilma Theater is now concluding its season with a mini-Churchill festival including two productions and a series of readings. The latter has opened with Cloud Nine, the play that vaulted Churchill to international prominence a generation ago. If the play shows its age now, it still scores enough points in Blanka Zizka’s knowing production to make a visit (or revisit) worthwhile.

The play’s two acts are a sendup, respectively, of Victorian sexual repression and of post-‘60s sexual confusion. It’s hard to tell which group of characters has the more miserable time of it, especially since the second set is an updated version of the first. The difference seems chiefly to be that whereas the Victorians were given roles to which nature was ordered to conform, the pre-Thatcher (and pre-AIDS) generation had was given every freedom except to find rules they were permitted to obey.

Programmatically, the feminist Churchill wants us to find the second state of affairs preferable, at least for gays and lesbians; what the playwright Churchill shows, however, is more on the order of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. If women are free now not only to have orgasms but to talk about them (Cloud Nine indeed!), they seem nonetheless painfully adrift, uncertain about careers, distracted by children who, feeding off the general anarchy, grow monstrous, and forming households rather than families.

Potential ingredients for a missionary stew

Act I, set in colonial British Africa, features an isolated family—--paterfamilias Clive, wife Betty, and the swishly pubescent Edward, who clings to dolls--— surrounded by those ever-restless natives. The family, too, is restless: Clive yearns for the neighbor widow, Mrs. Saunders; Betty has a yen for Harry, the visiting explorer, who actually prefers Edward; and so on. England Britain in the 1970s was smarting from its painfully fresh loss of empire, and so a travesty of its mores and glories might have given affront, or, depending on one’s point of view, at least amusement. From the perspective of the early 2000s, however, it is all rather shooting fish in a barrel, and although Zizka moves the text briskly through its paces, it has finally no place to go. By the end of the act, when the natives finally rebel, one would gladly see the whole family in a missionary stew. But since the characters have tomust be salvaged for their reprise in Act II, the political satire remains symbolic, while the gridlock of their sexual roles forbids comic resolution either.

Act II features Victoria, an estranged wife and mother, and Lin, a divorcee and lesbian. They take up together, as do Edward and Gerry, the new version of Edward and Harry. Gerry, a hustler, wearies of Edward’s wifely domesticity, and Edward settles in with Victoria (his sister) and Lin. Gerry shows up at the end, tired of his revels, and an elderly Betty, having ditched Clive, tries out masturbation and flirts with Victoria’s ex.

Shades of 'Mary Hartman'

Churchill tries to emphasize the permeability of roles and identities by gender- and race-bent casting; thus, the Betty of Act I is played by an adult male, as is the child Cathy of Act II, and so on. This novelty, too, goes only so far. If the characters of Act I are frozen in their Victorian stereotypes, those of Act II have a soap-opera superficiality—- say, that of a “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” to recall another ‘70s show of the Seventies that let it all hang out. Of course, Churchill is at a far different level of wit and sophistication, but the polymorphous perverse is no longer news, and the paean to autoeroticism with which the play ends—- the elder and younger Betty in each other’s arms— does not seem much of a liberation, let alone a solution.

Zizka herself conceded, in a recent Inquirer interview, that Cloud Nine had become dated by the Nineties’90s, but she contended that thinks itit’s newly relevant in today’s retro climate. Perhaps this is true, in Nebraska. But what remains timely in the play is the deep sense of melancholy that undergirds it. Sex, Churchill seems to suggest, is our consolation for the human tragedy, a consolation that only deepens it into comedy. And where, Will and Grace, do you go with that?

The ensemble playing by a doubled cast of seven— Judith Lightfoot Clarke, Amy Fitts, James Gale (twice a heterosexual male, hence twice a villain), Christina Keefe, Ben Sheaffer, Kraig Swartz, David Strattan White—-- is quite fine, as are Mimi Lien’s sets and John Stephen Hoey’s lighting. The Wilma has lavished a lot of care on bringing Cloud Nine back to life. If the effort is not quite successful, the cadaver is still instructive.



For another view by Dan Rottenberg, click here.