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TODAY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2014
Hey guys! I know I’m just the video game guy that usually dabs in inspirational literature for my own tiers but today I wanted to actually give some information about this awesome play that I came across at the Saints library. (Go Saint Soldiers!! LOL.) The play is called Cloud Nine (No it is not about drugs) and was written by Caryl Churchill. Plays aren’t normally as cool as hard-cold texts of pure mind-boggling character analysis and huge sophisticated words and stuff but this play is fucking amazing. The whole play carries a queer aspect that affects the plot, how the characters are illustrated and the relationships between the characters within the plot. This play was set in both the British colonial Africa during the Victorian era and then in a London park in 1979 which made the plot even more interesting because of the huge events taken place at this time. When reading the play, I looked for aspects that make the text queer but remember that term is not limited to one type of definition. Typically the act of queering is associated with words such as oddness (being weird or strange) and homosexuality (being homosexual or engaging in homosexual acts) but I discovered that the play portrayed more associations to the term; one in particular (and my favorite) is “questioning assumptions”. I questioned any assumptions made about sexuality and gender by challenging the normal way of describing the characters. Aside from queering, gender is another huge topic in Cloud Nine so if you plan on writing an academic essay for this play then it would be convenient and easy for gender to be the topic of the paper. When casting a play, all of the characters are usually played by the same actors and actresses to eliminate confusion and reinforce the conventional way of representing characters. Essentially, female characters are typically played by women and male characters are typically played by men. Churchill does not follow the conventional theater norms. Cloud Nine shows an act of cross-gender casting of the characters when the wife named Betty is performed by a man, the son Edward is performed by a woman and another child named Cathy is performed by a man. Interesting right??!!! This is the first time I have experienced a play such as this, I was genuinely interested and how events would play out. I hope everyone causes to at least skim through the play at some point because it deserves to be given a chance, plus the book isn’t very long and the text is extremely easy to read! Thanks for reading, until next time…
Nysia Ford
Nysia Ford