Theatre in Review: Cloud Nine (Atlantic Theater Company)

How is it that New York has not seen Cloud Nine in more than 30 years? It was an Off Broadway blockbuster, running 971 performances in the early 1980s, establishing Caryl Churchill as a playwright to contend with it, and adding considerable luster to the reputation of its director, Tommy Tune. Many other less-popular works by Churchill have been staged and brought back again, but somehow Cloud Nine has languished on the bookshelf. At last, it has returned, in a superbly acted production by James Macdonald that shows it to be both fresh as paint and irretrievably kissed by time. Churchill's stingingly amusing points about changing sexual and political mores hit their targets, even if the passage of the years has, in some cases, cast those targets in a different light.

Act I, with its merrily insolent take on the hypocrisies of the British Empire under Victoria, is as sharp as ever. Churchill focuses on a British colony in Africa, a group so riddled with sexual indiscretions that they can barely take notice of the restless natives gathering just outside of our view. Clive, the local administrator, is a living exemplar of all things British -- an icon of duty to God and country -- but his wife, Betty, can't help feeling dissatisfied, being consumed with guilt over her passion for Harry, an explorer and Clive's best friend. Little does she know that Clive is sleeping with Mrs. Saunders, the extremely independent widow who lives nearby. She would be shocked to know that Harry also has it off occasionally with Joshua, the African servant who insults her when no one else is present. And she would be apoplectic to know that Edward, her young son by Clive, enjoys an occasional night in Harry's bed as well. Of course, she is busy fending off the advances of Ellen, the governess, so she has no time for the others' problems.

If Victorian propriety seems like too easy a target, Churchill attacks the subject with vigor, combining outrageous staging ideas -- Clive plays an entire scene with his head up Mrs. Saunders' skirt -- with dialogue that has the acidulous rigor of Noel Coward. (Maud, Betty's extremely glum mother, by way of offering advice to her miserable daughter, comments, "Young women are never happy. Then, when they are older, they look back and see that, comparatively speaking, they were ecstatic.") Indeed, much of Act I plays like vintage Coward, if that playwright had been savagely critical of the British establishment. Indeed, if Tune's production came across as an extremely deftly staged sex farce, this time around we experience Churchill's unsparing eye for the cruelties of empire: When Clive realizes that the latest attempt at putting down a native uprising has resulted in the murder of Joshua's parents, he offers ten seconds of sympathy before requesting that Joshua get him a gin and tonic.

Throughout the first act, Macdonald's direction is gleefully in sync with Churchill's barbed intentions: in the opening, in which Joshua unfurls a Union Jack and the company sings a hymn to empire; in a game of catch designed to humiliate young Edward, who would rather clutch a doll than play boys' games; and in the marriage of convenience intended to solve all problems, but which in fact rings down the curtain on everyone's chances for happiness. The dialogue is consistently uproarious, blending formal Victorian diction with the steamy exchanges and cornball sentiments of mid-20th century Hollywood films. When Betty offers to run off with Harry, a man of his time, he replies, "I need to go up rivers, knowing that you are sitting at home, thinking of me." Clive, horrified to discover that his wife has sexual feelings of her own, cries out, "We must resist this dark female lust or it will swallow us up!" Betty, shocked beyond measure to learn of Harry's taste for boys, informs him that he is committing a terrible sin. "I've thought of killing myself." "You can't," Betty snaps. "That's a sin, too." It's a bracing reminder that Churchill, whose imagination has grown increasingly angry and apocalyptic in recent years, can be hilarious when she wants to be.

Adding to the playful, anything-goes nature of the enterprise is the free-form casting. Joshua, the African, is played by the white Sean Dugan. Betty is portrayed with just the right amount of Deborah Kerr hauteur by Chris Perfetti (in a stunning gown by Gabriel Berry that pointedly does not conceal his chest hair). Edward, who is already falling far short of the Rudyard Kipling ideal of British manliness, is played by Brooke Bloom. And Victoria, the baby of the family, is represented by a doll that, alarmingly, gets tossed around the stage like a cricket ball.

In Act II, however, Victoria, by now a politically progressive yet sexually ambivalent housewife, is played by Lucy Owens. It is Churchill's conceit that it is now 1979 but the characters have aged only 25 years. Thus, Victoria, a young mother, juggles her troubled marriage to Martin, a possible affair with the lesbian Lin, and the disruptive offer of a job in Manchester. Edward has grown up to be a closeted gay gardener, trying to handle a relationship with the frankly promiscuous Gerry. And Betty has aged into a stunningly conventional matron who studiously ignores her children's indiscretions and stuns everyone by announcing that she is divorcing Clive.

This act is, in its way, as accurate as its predecessor; it isn't the author's fault that the characters now seem as much of their time as they do in Act I. Gerry, the kind of gay guy who spends every night cruising public places for anonymous sex -- he has an amusing monologue about an oral encounter on a train, lasting for the six minutes that elapses between stops -- is a figure of the pre-AIDS past. So is Edward, who really wants to be a woman (an idea that, even in 1979, was past its sell-by date), decides that he is a lesbian, and ends up in a ménage à trois with Lin and Victoria. (Churchill never blanches, even for a second, over the incest angle here.) This being decades before marriage equality, Gerry definitively scotches Edward's hopes for a long-term relationship, complaining that Edward wants to play the role of a wife, and suggesting that marriage is not a suitable model for gay men.

Still, Churchill's point -- that, absent the strictures of Victorian morality, everyone has to invent their own sexual morals -- holds, and all of the characters are sympathetically observed. She even guides them toward happy endings, the most touching of which involves Betty, who finally learns to accept her children for who they are. She also learns to accept herself, in what is surely the most moving monologue ever written about masturbation. The finale, in which the Victorian and modern editions of Betty meet and embrace is as powerful as it ever was.

Cloud Nine is a play that makes enormous demands on its cast, and, thanks to the canny direction of Macdonald -- a Churchill specialist -- the company assembled for this production brilliantly walks the fine line between caricature and real feeling that the author demands. Dugan is a sinister presence as Joshua, who spies on his employers, reporting their indiscretions to Clive, and is enormously charming as the selfish Gerry, who belatedly discovers that there might be more to life than sex with strangers. Clarke Thorell is perfect in his plummy diction and smug attitude as Clive, becoming a cheerful hellion in Act II as Cathy, Lin's rambunctious little girl. Perfetti's Betty is a fine study in glazed composure, and his Edward is a believable loner trying to find his place in the world. Lucy Owen is hilarious as Maud (Betty's mother), casting a dread spell of propriety, like a Victorian funeral monument, and is strikingly natural as the conflicted Victoria. Izzie Steele pulls off a hat trick, appearing in Act I both as Ellen, burning with passion for Betty, and authoritatively wielding a riding crop as Mrs. Saunders, then returning in Act II as the tough, practical, sure-of-herself Lin. John Sanders is very funny as Harry, who can't say no to woman, man, or boy, and as Martin, who is so determined to portray himself as a liberated man that poor Victoria can't get a word in edgewise. Even among this accomplished company, the most dazzling double act belongs to Bloom, bursting with high spirits as Edward and tentatively learning to embrace the modern world as the elder Betty.

The set design, by Dane Laffrey, who his enjoying a breakout moment this season (he also has Spring Awakening and Fool for Love on Broadway), does away with the Atlantic's usual configuration for an in-the-round staging using audience bleachers (which, it must be admitted, are extremely uncomfortable). Gabriel Berry's costumes range from detailed period frocks to highly accurate renditions of late '70s casual wear. (Cookie Jordan's hair and wig designs are helpful in both acts.) Scott Zielinski's lighting seamlessly serves the staging, avoiding any attention-getting tricks. Darron L West's sound design is especially good in the first act, creating a constant undertone of jungle sounds (and drums) that evoke the hostile environment in which Clive and the others dwell.

In any case, Churchill's satirical eye is as sharp as ever, and if the world has moved on beyond her accurately reported late-'70s attitudes, Cloud Nine remains a useful, and highly entertaining, reminder that sexual morality can be a slippery thing and each generation must find its own imperfect truths. You may leave the theatre humbled, wondering what people will make of the way we live now thirty or forty years hence. -- David Barbour