Clive: This is my family. Though far from home We serve the Queen wherever we may roam. I am a father to the natives here, And father to my family so dear

Betty: I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life Is to be what he looks for in a wife, I am a man’s creation as you can see, And what men want is what I want to be.

The irony may be laid thick and the camp in full swing, but the opening lines of Cloud Nine nevertheless send a chill straight up the spine ofany sensitive theater-goer.

British playwright Caryl Churchill has often been lauded for her groundbreaking contributions to feminism in the theater. However, as these opening lines suggest, Cloud Nine is no more limited by one label than its characters are by their assigned roles. Husband, wife, British, African, Christian, pagan, male, female, mother, father, gay, straight, brother, sister, family, lover, liberated, enslaved, personal, political…Though the majority of Cloud Nine’s role-blurring and rule-breaking occurs on the field of sexual and love relationships, few, if any, identity or behavioral paradigms escape critique.

In this play, Oxford educated and radio trained, Churchill employs wit, intelligence and a certain economy of style to crack the acerbic whip over any and all social mandates, making them scream out "re-evaluate me!" Behind every appearance of stability there is instability, and every laugh is loaded. Adherence, flawed in its original conception, is not an option.

The first act of Cloud Nine unfolds in colonial Africa in 1880. Equipped with vainglorious speeches extolling Queen and country, British officer and poster boy for the patriarchy Clive (Collin Platt PO ’03) smugly struggles to stave off the natives and reign in the passions of his wife Betty and son Edward. Needless to say, he and the repressive social order he represents do not succeed. A remarkable cast of characters, including a sassy, whip-toting widow (Rachel Meyers SC ’02), a sort of homosexual explorer (Casey Wilson PO ’02), a pining governess (Lesley Muholland PO ’02) and a manically "civilized" grandmother (Kira Alker PO ’02), ensure that, by the end of the act, the Victorian structure has been, if not completely broken down, then revealed in its full absurdity and danger.

In act two, the scene shifts to the "modern" London of 1979. In this second half, the surety of assigned roles set forth in the first act loses precipitous ground as pedophilia, paganism, homosexuality, incest and gender-reversal are introduced - not as fixed, alternate behavior paradigms but as complicating factors, and unfortunate consequences, of a human nature which revolts against such codification.

This deconstruction extends even to the formal elements of the play itself. Set in both 1880 and 1979, Cloud Nine plays with time and space. Actors change roles from the first half to the second, and the time lapse of roughly a century is registered by the characters as only a twenty-five year difference. Thus, baby Vicky from act one becomes the 26-year-old "Vicki" in act two’s punk- rock London.

Staying true to Cloud Nine’s original casting, the Claremont Colleges’ production again places a male (Chris Cole PO ’05) in the role of Betty and a woman (Jessie Holland PI ’02) in the role of young Edward. Similarly, the actor playing Joshua (Drew Doyle PI ’02) the African house-boy, is white; again, as it was in the 1979 debut. These choices visually highlight the kind of self-effacement inherent to role adherence. Thus, just as Joshua’s opening lines, ("My skin is black but oh my soul is white. I hate my tribe. My master is the light. I only live for him. As you can see, what white men want is what I want to be") show him to have denied his race and his past, so too does the actor’s white face evacuate blackness from his entire presence.

In a different way, casting a female as Edward, the young boy who plays with dolls, becomes a kind of visual voix du sang or voix du genre. Just as in the European tradition of melodrama, a certain "feeling" might keep a character from kissing a woman that in the end turns out to be his long-lost sister, so here does the female face, staring out from a little boy’s bonnet, betray the "truth" of his identity. This is not to say that even this "alternative" identity is left static; in the second act, Edward, now played by Chris Cole, declares himself a lesbian, among other things.

On a purely practical level, the performance of Cloud Nine is particularly felicitous. This is due in part to the make- up of the theater department, which is particularly senior heavy this year. Five of the show’s seven-member cast are senior theater majors. All five underwent serious conservatory training in London last year, where, as chance would have it, most of them studied Cloud Nine. Moreover, Drew Doyle (Joshua, Kathy) noted that the time spent in England helped out with the mastery of British accents.

More significantly, Cloud Nine is in many ways particularly suited to a college performance. Director Carol Davis described her decision by noting that "[Cloud Nine] deals with issues that students think about, such as gender, identity, sex and role expectations. Students are experimenting with their own sexuality at college. One thing this play expresses is the contrast, between a time when roles were clearly defined yet people were unable to fulfill them, and today, when we have a bunch of choices, but also the responsibility to decide how we feel about these issues."

Certainly, a college audience- which by its very nature views itself as an ever changing community, with close ties to its internal structures, (be they social, political, academic, administrative etc) - will be more receptive to theater’s more subversive, catalytic possibilities. Senior Theatre major Lesley Muholland (Ellen) expressed her hope that a performance of this sort might incite its audience to reflect further on the social and institutional norms within which we operate: "[Cloud Nine] has a lot of challenges to pose to the audience. It is a comedy. Its crazy. It’s wacky. It’s fast paced. But there is always a little zing behind it. I’d love it if the audience went away a little pissed off, motivated to analyze our modern world and our modern Pomona College. As long as it plants some seeds, then I’m proud of what we’ve done."

And how, honestly, could a play containing such gems as "Effeminacy is contagious" not yield some kind of harvest?