Just Use A Condom

"A boy has no business having feelings," says the bombastic Victorian patriarch Clive (David Travis) to his son Edward (Jennifer Sun), who is crying because his doll was taken away. But in fact at the boys and men in "Cloud Nine" are full of feelings--usually lusty and often for each other--which they indulge at every opportunity.

The women also go beyond their duty to the empire: not only do they "lie still and think of England," but they pursue the men, and each other, with tireless voracity. In the second act, which is set in 1979 London, the frolics include an orgy in which Clive's daughter Victoria (Cori Lynn Peterson) invokes Ishtar while romping with her gay brother Edward (now played by Brain van Gorder) and her lesbian lover Lynn (Vonnie Roemer).

All this, and a plot too.

The first act is set in Victorian colonial Africa and revolves around the sexual tensions disrupting the "perfect" household of Clive and his wife Betty (Brain van Gorder). The casting in this play frequently crosses gender and racial lines, and in the first act this seems to indicate that Clive and his imperialistic patriarchal attempts to "tame" women and the Dark Continent have distorted the true natures of the other characters.

Thus Betty (played by a man) describes herself as "a man's creation," and Clive's "black" servant/protege (played by the blond John Knepper) insists that "my soul is white" and "I hate my tribe." Edward is supposed to be a boy but is played by a girl, which accords well with his "sissy" traits like playing with dolls and hating his father's bullying ways.

Enter Clive's friend Harry Bagley (Robert de Neufville), a middle-aged Banana poster-boy with a handlebar mustache. Betty wants him, really wants him, but he decides he'd rather have her as a pure inspiration than a roll in the hay.

It soon becomes clear, however, that Bagley's real reason for turning her down is that he secretly craves another kind of liberation from British family values: sex with boys. His first meeting with Joshua runs like this:

"The barn is all clear, sir."

"Shall we go in the barn and fuck, then? That's not an order."

"That would be all right, sir."

For Edward, Bagley provides liberation as well. Telling Bagley that he loves him, the boy gives him Betty's necklace and then says wistfully,

"You know what we did when you were here before? I want to do again. I try to do it myself but it's not as good."

And they go off stage to do it. Hey, at least they go offstage. That's not the case with Clive and Mrs. Saunders (Vonnie Roemer), a widow who enjoys flogging. Clive expresses passions for her that have no place in the patronizing domesticity of his marriage. She resists his advances at first, but to no avail. Undeterred, Clive sticks his head under her skirt and they have a jolly good time.

Meanwhile, Betty is fending off the advances of her children's governess Ellen (Vonnie Roemer), whom she eventually marries off to Bagley with advice that movingly highlights the Victorian woman's deprivation of sexual pleasure and knowledge. "Just keep still," she advises the bride to be, while knowing that even she is beginning to want more than that.

The second act transports the characters into 1979, but everyone's aged only 25 years. The actors have exchanged roles in a convoluted fashion:

Victoria, played by a doll in the first act, is now played by Cori Lynn Peterson, who was her grandmother in the first act. David Travis, formerly Clive, is now the goofy, spoiled toddler Kathy, whose mother is Victoria's friend Lynn (Vonnie Roemer). Bryan van Gorder and Jennifer Sun have exchanged roles, so that both Edward and Betty are played by the right sex. In the latter's case, this may mean that son and mother have found their true selves: he is gay, and she has left Clive and found a job.

It's meant to be confusing; this play plays fast and loose with ethnic, gender and sexual identities, in ways that are illuminating at times but usually simply gross.

Victoria's relationship with her husband martin (Robert de Neufville) is a case in point . Martin considers himself a liberated man, but he's getting fed up with being Mr. Sensitive. " I've read the Hite report," he tells us; he's even okay with Victoria's bisexuality But he can't help feeling that her telling him what she wants during sex is "like a driving lesson--left, right, faster, slower...." Enough said: she's out of there. She moves in with Lynn, and is eventually joined by Edward, who has broken up with his lover. The three of them all sleep in the same bed. Is everybody happy now? Of course they are.

The only moving moment in the second act is Betty's monologue near the end, when she talks about how she used to masturbate when she was little until her mother found out and made her stop. Now that she's left Clive, she's started doing it again, and has discovered that she is a real person in her own right without a man to give her an identity. The previous Betty (Bryan van Gorder) comes out and embraces her as the play ends.

Other than that, however, "Cloud Nine" is perverted.

If the play is meant to be merely a dark-humored farce, it should have more funny lines and less of a didactic message about patriarchy and imperialism. Decadence by itself can conceivably be fascinating and amusing if it's made clear that morality has no part in the world being depicted. When moral judgments are not an issue, the decadent scene can be viewed as art sufficient unto itself, whose amorality is part of the titillating effect of the play.

But "Cloud Nine" combines inspirational messages about sexual liberation with really sick combinations of sexual partners as the examples of that liberation. It's like watching a porno flick about saving the rain forests.

While presenting Clive's and Martin's versions of the heterosexual marriage as oppressive, the play judges the other relationships more leniently simply because they subvert this patriarchal normalcy. Harry's relationship with Edward in the first act is nothing but child abuse, and his fling with Joshua, the servant, can be seen as imperialistic exploitation. But these "relationships" are portrayed as merely alternative lifestyles, the gleeful return of the repressed in Clive's oh-so-normal British household.

Moreover, the protrayal of sexual relations in the play is often quite crude. Clive, coming out from underneath Mrs. Saunders' skirts, complains, "I have a hair in my mouth." Lynn's brother's ghost returns from the other side to give her an incisive commentary on why war is hell: "I was bored all day and wanking all night." And so on.

The excellent and versatile acting is the only thing that makes this performance worth watching. David Travis perfectly captures the body language and tone of voice of a little girl who loves obscene jump-rope rhymes and messy ice cream pops. John Knepper is impressive as the vacant-eyed but sly Joshua and then as Edward's swaggering, promiscuous lover Jerry. The rest of the cast also turns in a fine performance.

An unwitting touch of humor is added by the program notes, which warn that the play was written in 1979 before we knew about AIDS. Kids, don't try this at home: "The only way to completely avoid AIDS is to abstain from sexual intercourse," cautions the program for a play which contains 10 1/2 depictions or descriptions of extramarital sex. The moral is clear: If you sleep with your sister, use a condom.

Cloud Nine

by Caryl Churchill

Friday and Saturday

At the Loeb Experimental