If Studio Theatre has a go-to playwright, it’s been Caryl Churchill, the award-winning British innovator and provocateur, whose season-opening “Cloud 9” at the theater is as brash and challenging as anything on area stages, and yet was first written over 30 years ago.
Perhaps the world has caught up with Churchill enough to make a gender-fluid satire about the hypocrisy of British propriety make perfect sense. But likely it’s been aided by rock steady, clear direction by Michael Kahn, who is used to making the most classic texts more vivid at the Shakespeare Theater Company which he has made so prominent as artistic director. The other big asset: an unimpeachable cast embodying multiple roles that couldn’t be more contrasting.
“Cloud 9” begins in Victorian England, when the sun never set on the empire’s holdings and the family at hand is bringing British rule to Africa. And yet within this seemingly exemplary, patriotic family there are obvious cracks. Its patriarch has been having an affair with a neighbor; the wife and their effeminate son lusts after an adventurous family friend, who is gay. A maid is after the matriarch, meantime, and a local man hired to calm fellow Africans hired as workers may not be as loyal as he pretends.
On top of this may be what seems to be the most open casting ever, as a man (Wyatt Fenner) plays the wife; a young woman (Laura C. Harris) plays the effeminate son; a woman of African descent (Joy Jones) plays the even more proper mother of the wife, while a white man (Philippe Bowgen) plays the African native.
This is not some wicked Studio meddling, it’s largely how Churchill intended it. And strangely, because of the talents of the cast and the steady, unblinking direction, it all works in depicting a social order crumbling all around them.
What’s more, it brings even more admiration for the cast come the second act, heralded with Led Zeppelin and set in a London park. Churchill plays with the time change because as creator she can. It’s set in the “present-day” 1979, and yet only 25 years have passed for the characters, the youngest of which have become the adult focus (and have different actors portraying them).
By now the youngest daughter Victoria (Harris), tossed around as an actual doll in act one, is now a wife and mother, toying with a job move and a change in her marriage. Her brother Edward became a thoughtful gay man who is navigating that in a society where it could lose him his job. He’s portrayed by John Scherer, who in act one was the trumpeting, proper father who tormented the son.
Their mother, trying to cope with her own marital changes, is played with charm and humanity by Holly Twyford, who of everyone probably gives the tour de force. She spent the first act rushing on and off stage as both the brash neighbor woman and the housemaid.
Different characters occasionally stroll on in the modern day to remind you of their past presence. Among them, Christian Pederson, who played the dashing adventure man in act one rather in the style of Monty Python’s Michael Palin, and is trying to become a 20th century man in act two.
Fenner in act two is playing a leather-coated gay man with some nuances; Bowgen is a little girl (and a soldier).
Through the bravura range of performances, the theme of a vast range of humanity outside of its prescribed roles is underscored.
Studio’s “Cloud 9” also benefits from a strong production, with a British music hall proscenium above the African veranda and British park in Luciana Stecconi’s set; proper and what must be very durable costumes by Frank Labovitz (there are a few rapid changes), and lighting by Peter West appropriate to an empire where its sun never sets – or has long since ducked under the horizon.
Despite the title, “Cloud 9” operates in the real earth, where its habitants are desperate to make the sense of its social strictures.
“Cloud 9” continues through Oct. 16 at Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.