This embrace will ring a bell for our contest winners – and other fans of Cloud 9

A few weeks ago we asked everyone – our cast, folks on the street and eager theatre fans hoping to win tickets to Cloud 9 – to complete the sentence “I’m on Cloud 9 when….”

This past Tuesday the winners of our lucky draw enjoyed a dinner out, tickets to Cloud 9 and a backstage tour courtesy director Alisa Palmer. One of our winners, Steve Rudman, reported “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was as if I was in Paris at a theatre. I was greeted at the door by a person that took me and my guest directly to our seats. The whole evening was spectacular.” Michelle Threndye, another winner, wrote “This is a very witty, charming and sexy play. The cast is outstanding. And it was such a pleasure to meet Alisa – she’s such an insightful director. Thank you for the wonderful night out!”

We’re excited to report that we have another surprise contest winner. So many of the entries were heartfelt, sweet, even funny – we decided to ask cast member and celebrated author Ann-Marie MacDonald to read the more than 700 entries and choose her own personal favourite.

It was Sally Thomas’s submission that caught Ann-Marie’s attention: “I’m on Cloud 9 when I see my tattered life reflected back to me in all its glory!” In acknowledgement of her thoughtful entry, Sally receives a signed copy of Ann-Marie’s acclaimed second novel “The Way the Crow Flies”. As many of you know, Ann-Marie’s first novel “Fall on Your Knees” is currently in contention as part of CBC’s annual Canada Reads competition.

Thanks to everyone for participating.

A look at our cast/character list reveals there’s something strange going on in Cloud 9. Some characters from Act 1 recur in Act 2, but they’re not played by the same actors. And in the colonial Africa of Act 1, Evan Buliung plays a woman, Ann-Marie MacDonald plays a young boy, and Ben Carlson plays a black African. In Act 2 (London circa 1980), David Jansen plays a five-year-old girl.

This isn’t some kind of half-baked experiment or the whim of director Alisa Palmer. In fact playwright Caryl Churchill dictates this casting very specifically – and our cast has a few insights why.

“I think Churchill’s working with the idea that gender and race and class are often constructs, they’re often behaviours we create, stories we tell ourselves about who we should be,” says Ann-Marie. “And they’re political structures too, part of how we organize ourselves in society. Sometimes those structures are politically expedient. They’re a really good shorthand way of saying ‘you’re a woman, you have no power.’”

“Churchill uses the casting as a device to ask us to look at something with a different set of eyes,” says Megan Follows. “She’s playing with our preconceived notions of people, and that goes for sexuality too. The casting turns homosexuality into heterosexuality, heterosexuality into homosexuality, there’s bisexuality too. Preconceptions go out the window.”

Ann-Marie suggests an additional layer. “I think the casting also tells us something about what’s happened to the British Empire. In Act 2, five-year-old Cathy is played by the man who plays the patriarch in the first act. The patriarch is gone, and instead there’s an angry, joyful, hungry little girl who doesn’t know how to direct her energies, who runs around in a pink dress, toting a gun.” Adds David, who gets to wear the pants and then the dress: “Cathy, like any young child, dominates a room. In a way, she’s like a little emotional imperialist – an imperialist with a skipping rope.”

(Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

CLOUD 9 isn’t the first Caryl Churchill project that director Alisa Palmer and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald have collaborated on. In 2008, Alisa won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Direction of Soulpepper’s much-lauded production of Churchill’s Top Girls – a production that featured not just Ann-Marie but Megan Follows as well.

There’s more about Ann-Marie and Alisa’s past collaborations, Alisa’s passion for Churchill’s work, and how she and Mirvish Productions are working together to create “a commercial theatre culture that can support both tour-bus blockbusters and high art” in this article in the Globe and Mail.

Ann-Marie MacDonald channeling nine-year-old Edward

On the Sunday rehearsal before the Christmas break, I dropped everything I had been doing with Betty, my second act character. I sensed that my vocal placement had become a mask, in a bad way – more of a barrier to who she is, than a portal. I also know – or think I know – where all the laughs are, and while that is very important ultimately, it had become a liability for me. I felt like I was doing funny-voice acting. All I needed was a funny hat to go with it.

So I dropped it all…and went denuded into a run of the second act. I felt awful. I wasn’t doing anything. I had nothing to hang on to. I sucked. After the run, Alisa, the director, congratulated me on my giant step forward. She said she had never seen me be so brave. “Brave,” I thought, “yeah, a euphemism for, ‘you sucked, but with dignity this time.’” I didn’t know how I’d get through the week’s festivities with the shadow of my total failure hanging over me. At the same time, I recognized that self-loathing conviction as a spasm of strategic self-preservation. But which “self” was it preserving? The skeptical one, the guarded one, the one that doesn’t want to make a fool of itself.

So here I am back in rehearsal after the break, unsure of who will emerge tomorrow when we return to Act 2. Part of what’s weird is that Betty is much closer to me in many ways than is Edward, my character in Act 1. Edward is a nine-year-old boy who is struggling with his identity and sexuality, and going through some formative – and deforming – experiences. He feels like a much shorter walk from me than Betty. And yet Betty is only two or three years older than I am. Plus, she’s a woman. And yet, I had felt the need of an almost Are You Being Served?/Hiacynthe Bucket/Thames-side/Ealing Studios/Brit-comedy take on her to get any traction.

Here’s the thing: I know I’m going to tunnel my way back to her voice, her hat, her teetering poise, and my hope is that when I finally recover these holy grails, they’ll be invested with soul. But it’ll be like digging myself out of Stalag 13 with a spoon. Truth and self-exposure are like that. Makes me want to run silently-screaming to the privacy of my lair and start writing something. And of course, that’s when the snake starts devouring its own tail: beginnings are easy, exciting. First paragraphs are always brilliant. Funny voices work a treat for the first week of rehearsal. Then comes the art part. And as always, I say to myself, I says, “Self? This is too hard.”

So you get to see a great comedy plus you get a great novel that’s part of a nationwide event. How can you beat that?

Hurry though – this is a limited time offer. You must book by December 31, 2009 and use the code KNEES to access this great deal.

Call 416-872-1212 or 1-800-461-3333 for more details, or click here to order online.

I knew the play was fierce, with a kind of gritty, intentionally flat use of language that is mercilessly naturalistic with none of the embellishments of American naturalism – say the self-conscious cadences and cut-offs of Mamet, the lyricism of Tennesse Williams, the tragic earnestness of Arthur Miller. Then, just when I’ve decided the language is brutally spare, the play breaks into soliloquy. I look closer, and find the punctuation is…punctilious! The words are set as precisely as music, the punctuation an unerring clue to the pace and state of the speaker. I circle the “and’s” in my text. I circle the “very’s”. I count the number of lines until there’s finally a period and the stakes become clearer to me. I knew the play was funny when I heard us read it. Irreverent. Wicked. Packed with laughs of recognition and horror. And I’ve come to understand that the humour is both immanent in the situations, and deftly crafted in the lines themselves. I knew the play was the opposite of sentimental. Today I realized that it’s also terribly sad. I’ve gotten choked up at unexpected moments. Evan is the tallest and muscly-est person in the cast and he’s wearing high heels, and a gown with a corset (we’ve all made the inevitable jokes and continue to mine the endless possibilities for ridicule which will only deepen and get richer as we begin our backstage life together after opening) – he plays a woman whose ability to appear convincingly helpless is her bread and butter. When he/she stands on stage, alone, waiting, and watching, it’s heartbreaking.