["Cloud 9"] may not transport the audience all the way to Cloud 9—but it surely keeps us on our toes. The evening's subject is sexual confusion, and 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 daft writer. "Cloud 9" … has real failings, but intelligence and inventiveness aren't among them; we're always interested in what the playwright is up to, no matter what the outcome….

[The first] half of "Cloud 9" is about what happens when a very proper colonial British family receives a visit from a pith-helmeted explorer named Harry Bagley…. While the natives outside the camp are getting restless, they have nothing on the rakish Harry. He's really been too long in the bush. Grabbing every clandestine opportunity he can, this explorer seduces the household's wife (played by a man), schoolboy son (played by a woman) and obsequious black servant (played by a white)—all before getting married to the governess, a lesbian.

What makes this carnal circus funny is the contrast between the characters' manners and deeds. No matter what they do, Miss Churchill's colonials act and talk like true-blue, genteel Victorians. When Harry is caught in a homosexual act, he apologizes by explaining that he is merely the helpless victim of "a disease worse than diphtheria."

The joke does wear thin too quickly. Once we understand that Miss Churchill is stripping bare the hypocrisies of an oversatirized era, Act I becomes stalled. The transsexual casting is also problematic: though the male and female impersonations are amusing, not smirky, they nonetheless serve the unwanted function of announcing the jokes. Nor is the story's farcical structure so strong that it pulls up the slack. Instead of the ingenious clockwork of, say, an Alan Ayckbourn play, Miss Churchill provides a progression of overly similar scenes that steadily reveal each character's particular proclivity.

Act II has its own problems—and pleasures. We re-encounter three members of the 1880 family, as well as four new characters, and find that, in 1980, they are as liberated as their predecessors were repressed. But progress presents its own difficulties. The homosexual schoolboy of 1880, now hitting middle age, is so confused by his love for both his sister and an insolent young male lover that he worries that he might be a lesbian….

Miss Churchill covers this and much more territory by relying on tender monologues. The speeches are very well written, but one hungers for stronger interchanges between the characters. An element of ideological Polyanna-ism also creeps in, for the playwright provides most of her lost souls with happy endings. Is everyone really so much better off in the swinging 1980's? It seems a waste that Act II's wittiest conceit—the ghostly return of characters from Act I—is mainly used to draw mawkish parallels between now and then….

[Betty] delivers a beautiful closing speech in which she graphically describes how she overcame her sheltered 1880 upbringing to take her rightful place in a modern, feminist world of infinite possibilities. "If there isn't a right way to do things," she explains, "you just have to invent one."

By the end, we're terribly moved by this middle-aged woman's brave attempt to reinvent herself—just as we're moved by Caryl Churchill's attempt to reinvent the comedy of manners so that it might do such a heroine justice.