REVIEW: TU's Cloud 9: Production 10, Play 3

What is so great about college-level productions is clearly evident from the minute you walk into TowsonUniversity's Mainstage Theatre in their newly refurbished Center for the Arts.  The first thing you see is the well-built, suggestive, but not too obvious, completely wooden set and lovely mood lighting designed by Daniel Ettinger (this man must not sleep - he designs everything in Baltimore it seems!).  And then the play starts.  The youthful exuberance and willing risk-taking that is so often missing once an actor goes "pro" is on full, proud view.  The cast of seven begins in a pose reminiscent of Mother's family in Ragtime (lovely costumes designed by Daniel Rehbehn), and sings the silliest (and entirely appropriate) little ditty about family in Britain.  The audience howls and shrieks with delight, and sparkle in the eyes of the cast says, "We got through that and they liked us, now we can relax and have fun."

            And do they ever have a ball!  One can only imagine the rehearsals where the cast began learning the over-the-top caricatures of morally upright, I mean uptight, Victorians somewhere in 19^th Century Africa defending the Crown, and their 20^th Century, loose-moral counterparts. .  They play the stereotypes to the hilt, in a terrifically paced comedy of manners, lampooning the very conventions of those societies.  What makes their portrayals (wonderful cast-wide) so good is they have patently avoided the pitfalls of the play which could have really gotten them into trouble.  Their director, Steven J. Satta has guided this production with a light breezy touch, a zany pace, and a terrific amount of earnestness - perfection for a dark satire.  His actors understand what they are mocking, and the characters they have created truly believe what they are saying.  There in lies the real success to performing black comedy and satire.

            As the servant Joshua and the gay Brit Edward, Bobby Libby delivers a sometimes funny, sometimes dangerous, but always winning performance.  During an Act One sequence where he is relating an African folktale about the moon, he is absolutely mesmerizing.  Lauren Pierce as the uptight Victorian mother-in-law and later as the increasing open-minded middle aged mother coming to terms with a gay son and a sexually experimental bisexual/lesbian couple is both funny and heartbreaking - this is an actress who understands levels of character and nuance in performance.  Other members of the cast do excellent work in one act or the other (that is NOT to say they do badly in the other act).  Strength and vulnerability are excellently mixed and carefully meted out by Haily Wineland as Lin, a single parent lesbian, in Act Two.  Ed Ronspies huffs and puffs his way through the Act One role of Clive, a morals spewing father and soldier, a man's man, if you will.  He expertly plays a scene where he is sermonizing in the "special bond" two male friends have that no female could understand, all the while not realizing that what he is saying sounds like a come-on to his best friend, and closeted homosexual, Harry.  As Harry, Steve Polites has perhaps the most difficult role to play in Act One, and he does so with great skill.  In the act, he must portray a boorish he-man explorer, reeking of testosterone, fending off the ladies, particularly his best friend's wife, Betty, fending off Clive's young, impressionable son, Edward  who wants more sex (Theresa Ewell in a difficult, but charming performance, and yes, Harry is a pedophile, too), and fending off his own desires for men in general.  Polites is less effective in Act Two, but it is more an issue with the role as written than with his acting of it.

            Remember this name: Charlie Long.  He is going to be big.  He is absolutely superb as Betty in Act One (yes, Betty!) and amazing as Gerry in Act Two.  He has the mannerisms, affectations and subtle feminine coyness of his complex Victorian mother role down pat.  His physicality and vocal work are 100% believable and effortless - you never feel he is "acting."  Maybe 15 seconds into his performance, you forget he is a man playing a woman.  And as the sexually charged gay hustler, Gerry, he portrays a hardened soulless nonchalance with just the right amount of vulnerability.  Mr. Long gives a performance that I, for one, will remember for some time to come.

            Ok, so everything on display is excellent - the cast, the direction, the design.  What is missing?  Oh, yes, a decent vehicle for all of this excellence! 

Well, Cloud 9, By Caryl Churchill, seems to be the perfect choice for a college production.  It is artsy in presentation, has deep themes to study, has edgy characters and foul language, has period costuming, and just screams for a symbolic set.  In short, it is a grown up play for young grown ups.  The ideas the play presents are certainly topical - as the conservatives in this country continue to bring their narrow-mindedness to the mainstream and the term "family values" continues to be a Republican mantra.  Heck, even the notion that manly men can be queer was the subject of a now famous cowboy movie this year.  Even better, this week's fallout from liberal Hollywood (including ludicrous comments from an actor whose whole career is recognizable by a gladiator film and a drag role, and therefore owing a lot to the gay community) has the world's entertainment center taking 3 giant steps backward just goes to show that the whole idea of homosexuality in this country needs to be even more out there and in discussion, which makes this play more than current.

The way it presents these themes and ideas is the culprit here.  What must have been ground-breaking in the late 70's is now trite, passe and downright boring.  Gender switching has been a popular format for examining sex roles for centuries - most of Shakespeare's comedies have this element in some form or other.  Using the "f bomb" can happen in a PG-13 movie these days, and frank monologues about oral sex, gay hustling and masturbation are practically de rigueur in any play written in the last 20 years or more to be taken seriously.  Even the device of past characters facing their modern counterparts (though beautifully staged here) comes across as clunky.  All of this shock value is no longer shocking and even laughable at times.  That laughter is more of a laughing "at" than laughing "with," which is not a good thing at all.  Perhaps saddest of all is the continuance of a double standard: men-dressed-as-women is funny, women dressed as men makes a point; effeminate men must be played for laughs, lesbian couplings are serious stuff.  Ask the audience who attended with me - Betty a man playing a woman (with dead on accuracy, I might add) is laughter inducing, a prissy young man realizing his true orientation is a scream (as long as we can laugh about it, it  is ok to be gay), and yet the seduction and eventual kiss between two women is greeted with a dead silence dripping with "we-are-seeing-something-important-here" meaning. 

Of course, it could be said that those examples just point up the playwright's message that through time gender roles will always be held to a double standard.  It just has since been told in any number of better ways.  Still, the production itself is worth the trip to the TowsonUniversityCenter for the Arts.  The future of American theatre is alive and well on that stage, and that future looks exceptionally bright.

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