Reading the script for Caryl Churchill's 1979 play about sex and love is a special workout for the imagination. First, she asks you to imagine characters whose sexual identities and alliances shift constantly. Then she asks you to imagine that most of the characters make an impossible leap in time, from colonial Africa in the Victorian age to contemporary Britain. Lastly, she asks you to imagine some of the male characters played by women and some female characters played by men. Churchill likes to get things good and mixed up so all the audience's preconceptions about gender, romance, and "lifestyle" are scrambled, neutralized, and possibly even rebuilt. The title refers to the state of orgasmic and emotional bliss that everyone in this play seems to be striving for so desperately.


Frank Rich, The New York Times
"...Miss Churchill has found a theatrical method that is easily as dizzying as her theme. Not only does she examine a cornucopia of sexual permutations--from heterosexual adultery right up to bisexual incest-- but she does so with a wild array of dramatic styles and tricks....Miss Churchill, as you might gather is one deft writer."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Cloud Nine is an inventive, surrealistic and entertaining look at sexual repression and sexual role conditioning.

The first act takes placei n Victorian Africa, suggeting the parallel between colonial and sexual repression. Clive, the whtie man, imposes his

ideals on his family and the natives. Betty, his wife, is played by a man because she wants to be what men want her to be; and Joshua, their black servant, is played by a white man because he wants to be what whites want him to be.

The second act is set in London in 1979--in the

changing sexuality of our own time. The characters, who have ages only twenty-five years, have become more real to themselves, men suffer as well as women, and our identities are warped by conforming to "unnatural norms".

tricks....Miss Churchill, as you might gather is one deft writer (Frank Rich, The New York Times)

dipped in ice water (Walter Kerr, The New York Times)