“Cloud 9” at Studio Theatre (review): More timely now than ever before
In Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill toys with gender, class, and time to spectacular effect
It transpires that everyone — or almost everyone, anyway — wants to fuck British explorer Harry Bagley (Christian Pedersen). He’s welcomed with open arms into the family at the heart of Cloud 9 (
), Caryl Churchill’s mischeviously provocative comedy. Bagley is the type of swashbuckling hero ripped straight out of folklore, yet he comes accessorized with a few Harlequin romance twists: This Victorian-era, unbounded explorer is always up for an adventure, regardless of gender.
“Shall we go into the barns and fuck?” he point-blank asks the family’s servant, Joshua. He accepts without skipping a beat.
As is the case with much of Churchill’s work, Cloud 9 is deliberately confounding, but it’s bolstered by a remarkable production at Studio Theatre. Directed with assuredness by Michael Kahn, the 1979 comedy is viewed in a prescient light on matters of gender identity and sexual orientation. Churchill’s tale is lighter and more warm-hearted — and certainly more gay-friendly and sex-positive — than many satires from its era, and on par with the most enlightened comedies today.
You’re likely to struggle to keep things straight — in every sense of the term. From a rather dry and droll start as a comedy of manners, Cloud 9 reveals itself to be more than a straightforward satire of Victorian-era traditions and mores, or even that of race relations and patriarchal attitudes in the British Empire. Focusing on a British family, it scrambles details in intriguing mix-ups of gender, race, sexuality, age, even time. Centuries separate the first and second acts. The first is set in a British colony in Africa, the second in 1979 London, yet only 25 years have lapsed in the lives of the characters who carry over from the two acts: Siblings Edward and Victoria and their mother Betty, who by Act II is separated from her opressive husband, family patriarch Clive. All three grow and look dramatically different from act to act, played by a different actor in each.
Wyatt Fenner portrays, without a sense of irony or high camp, the demure, nearly neutered Betty in Africa, who then morphs into an image of a modern-day, middle-aged woman (Holly Twyford). Fenner takes on a new role, playing the hyper-masculine, promiscuously gay Gerry, Edward’s lover. And while Edward is first seen as a petulant, doll-loving boy (Laura C. Harris), he grows up to be a sensitive, questioning male adult (John Scherer, who in Act I plays Clive). Harris, meanwhile, swings from playing Edward to the adult Victoria — a living, thinking, bisexual instead of the lifeless, expressionless Victoria we meet in Act I.
Throughout, we see the characters in different sexual situations and in combinations of gender — at times it’s as if everyone is fucking someone else. Their rampant sexual tendencies become a problem mostly in the repressive era of Act I, revolving around moments when characters get caught straying from heteronormative behavior.
The show’s star is Holly Twyford, and not just because of her top standing in D.C.’s theater community. Twyford assumes the roles of three separate characters, one more than anyone else, with each a nice contrast to the last. In Act I, she rotates, with impressively quick costume changes, between the dutifully obedient governess Ellen, a lesbian at heart, and the colony’s widow Mrs. Saunders, who becomes a dominatrix right out of Clive’s power play dream.
Later, as Betty in Act II, Twyford portrays a woman freed after decades of opression and repression with a mix of bewilderment and bemusement, happy and at ease. She’s beginning to accept the complications and confusion of living in an open-minded, open-ended way. It’s a message more timely now than ever.
Cloud 9 runs to Oct. 16 in the Metheny Theatre, 14th & P Streets NW. Tickets are $44 to $88. Call 202-332-3300 or visit studiotheatre.org.
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