Ethel M. Barber Theatre, Theatre and Interpretation Center, 2007
By Caryl Churchill
Featuring: Kenner Bolt, Jordan Cohen, Ben Diskant, Marco Minnichello, Lee Stark, Zeke Sulkes, Sarah Grace Welborn
Scenic Designer: Collette Pollard
Lighting Designer: Brandon Wardell
Costume Designer: Chelsea Warren
Music Composed by: Brett Masteller
Music Director: Joel Esher
Choreographer: Jackson Evans
Dramaturg: Jacob Juntunen
Etiquette Coach & Dialogue: Cindy Gold
Fight Choreographer: Joey deBettencourt, James Ballard
Assistant Director: Rebecca Stevens.
Program Notes: My parents were born in the early 1940s. They both grew up and came of age in Midwestern towns in the thick of the 1950s and early 1960s, where their very sense of identity was molded from the rather inflexible casts of strict societal codes regarding gender, age, race and class. By the time my parents graduated from college, got married and had some babies (my brother and sister), the counter-cultural revolution of the late 1960s had, for all practical purposes, passed them by. While people not much younger than them were doing LSD, sexually experimenting and rocking out at Woodstock, my parents were busy with the more practical concerns of the day-to-day: essentially making a safe and comfortable home for my brother and sister. And yet, around them the world was drastically changing from a place of certainty and stability to one of unexpected change and chaos. Around the time when I was born in 1979, my parents were finally beginning to deal with the social ramifications of a cultural revolution they never took part in. After the safe, commonly-held ideals by which my parents built their lives around shattered, I watched them silently ask themselves, “Who am I now?”
Cloud 9 traces a journey similar to that of my parent’s generation, following a group of disparate people as they try to squeeze themselves into the socially appropriate molds of their day, and then seek to redefine and, literally, rebuild their identities when those molds are broken and the pieces scattered. In the chaos of a liberated world, they seek to discover who they are–in essence, to foster their inner-bad-ass-rock-stars–but they seek to do so in the company of others.
I find this world to be filled with endless possibility and wonder. And yet, like the characters in Cloud 9, I, too, am continuously daunted by uncertainty and chaos. Fortunately, in the cultural and generational space I occupy, there are few boundaries that prevent me from nurturing my inner-bad-ass-rock-star. Yet, as I venture into the next unknown era– my post-graduate-school “adult” years–I find myself wondering how I can be the bad-ass I have worked so hard to become and not be alone. My friends assure me that as long as I find the courage to stand on my own, they will keep me company. This production is for them.
