He’s a She, But She’s a What?

As area theatergoers are going to discover when Cloud Nine opens on June 13, Caryl Churchill is no ordinary playwright.

Consider a couple of her other plays — for example, Top Girls and Blue Heart. Top Girls opens with a celebratory dinner being given in the mid-1980s for a woman named Marlene who has just been promoted to manager of an employment agency. Who else is at the dinner? Well, there's Isabella Bird (1831-1904), a world traveler centered in Edinburgh; Lady Nijo (born 1258), a Japanese courtesan who became an itinerant Buddhist nun; Dull Gret, a fictional character who, in a Brueghel painting, leads a crowd of women against hell's devils; Pope Joan, who, disguised as a man, is thought to have been Pope between 854 and 856; and finally, Patient Griselda, whose story is told by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.

At a modern-day restaurant, these women — real and fictional — chat, remember their lives, congratulate Marlene and enjoy their dinner. How is it possible? Churchill never explains, just puts us in their presence. Then we get to Act Two — and all Marlene's dinner partners disappear. Now the play is about Marlene's employment agency and her troubled relations with her sister Joyce. Suddenly, the play ends, and we're left with a bunch of questions: Is Marlene a ruthless climber and, in fact, the play's villain? But then what was the point of that seemingly feminist dinner party with Pope Joan and Lady Nijo? How were we supposed to react when we learned that Joyce's daughter was really Marlene's? And isn't it the playwright's obligation to deliver us from so much uncertainty?

Or consider Blue Heart. In Part One, entitled "Heart's Desire," a father, mother and aunt are waiting for a relative to return home from Australia. But only moments after the play begins, it suddenly stops — and then starts again, from the beginning. These rewinds recur — and then, after a while, even stranger things happen. At one juncture, two gunmen appear and shoot everyone in the play dead (the play starts again moments later with the principals back on their feet). At another moment, a 10-foot-tall bird enters. Explanation? None. Effect on the spectator? Fascination.

And Part Two, called "Blue Kettle," is equally intriguing. Here we meet a man who is conning elderly women into believing that he is the son they put up for adoption many years before. But while this perfectly viable plot unfolds, something strange happens: the words "blue" and "kettle" keep turning up in the dialogue ("You blue you want me to blue your aunty. You blue to Mrs. Blue you wanted her to meet your father's kettle.") Finally, all that the characters can say are the words "blue" or "kettle" or some fragment of these two words, as if a linguistic fungus had taken over their speech centers. Once again there's no explanation, just the stubborn dramatic fact.

Is there a method to this madness? It may be that Churchill, a radical feminist, is trying to avoid traditionally male ways of making a play ("I remember … thinking of the 'maleness' of the traditional structure of plays, with conflict and building in a certain way to a climax.") Or it may be that she's merely being true to a manifesto she wrote in 1960, when her career was just getting started: "Playwrights don't give answers, they ask questions. We need to find new questions, which may help us to answer the old ones or make them unimportant, and this means new subjects and new form."

In any case, audiences have come to expect that a new Churchill play will challenge conventional ideas of dramatic form, and very likely defeat our expectation that "what comes next" will necessarily illuminate what came before. Dramas by Caryl Churchill just don't play by the rules. Depending on your perspective, that's their strength — or their weakness.

Which brings us to Cloud 9, soon to open at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in a Jobsite Theater production. The play is in two acts, with the first taking place in a British colony in Africa during Victorian times, and the second unfolding in 1979 London. Only problem is that several of the characters from Act One are back in Act Two — but they've only aged 25 years. Other oddities: In Act One, a man plays the main female character, a white man plays her black servant, a woman plays her son and her daughter is played by a dummy. In Act Two, all the characters are played by members of the proper sex with one exception: a five-year-old girl played by a man. What does it all mean? Well, Churchill herself explains in a preface that "Betty … is played by a man because she wants to be what men want her to be, and, in the same way, Joshua, the black servant, is played by a white man because he wants to be what whites want him to be."

All right, that much makes sense. But Churchill's explanations for other reversals are not quite as convincing, and the prominence of gay and lesbian characters throughout both acts suggests Churchill's real project: to make us question from start to finish our assumptions about human essences, whether they be essences of gender, sexuality or race.

In Act One we see Clive, the conventional Victorian patriarch, try "manfully" to enforce his ideas on the life around him. In Act Two we see the liberation — confusing as it can be — that ensues when Clive is gone (for example, one of the men says: "I think I'm a lesbian.") Another way of looking at it: Act One is about the problems of a society that prescribes roles; Act Two is about the problems of a society that doesn't.

And oh yeah, I almost forgot: The whole thing can be a lot of fun. It's possible to find Churchill a little cold at times, but her paradoxes can also hit us right where we need to laugh. If the Jobsite production works, it should be very comic.

So put on your thinking cap and your funny glasses: Caryl Churchill's coming.

And be glad of this chance to encounter one of England's most important playwrights.

Latest on AsoloThe Florida State University Board of Trustees is expected to accept on June 13 the new contract negotiated by FSU and the Asolo Theatre concerning the continued existence in Sarasota of the FSU/Asolo Conservatory.

So, it looks like the Conservatory is going to stay, after all.

I'll have more to say after the 13th.

Contact performing arts critic Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 305.

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2003.