Watching Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud 9” could give you a real case of the Stroop effect. This piece of neuroscience is why it’s harder to read aloud the name of a color if the text is printed in a different one. If the word “blue” is written in green ink, you have to work harder to process it. Churchill’s first act twists your brain like that: She has men playing women, grown women playing little boys, white men playing black men, young ladies playing old women. The incongruence grows as we see that this part of the show is set in the overly restrictive environment of a late 19th century Victorian colony in Africa. And it hits a fever pitch right about the time Harry, a uniformed officer, turns to a male servant and casually asks him if he’d like to go to the barn and fuck.

Churchill is a master of deliberate contradiction. Her 1978 play delights in the explosively performative. She insists that we’re all constantly performing to some degree our age, our race, and especially our gender. And if that’s true, then it follows that there must also be an audience for whom we’re compelled to construct our show. Enter the White Man, first in the form of Clive (played by Matthew Lindsay Payne). At first it seems that Clive is the butt of Churchill’s joke, since we immediately see that he can’t detect the truth right in front of his face. But as the first act progresses, it becomes clear that she intends something more sinister. Everyone around Clive has to twist and turn to accommodate his very narrow worldview, and what lies outside its borders must be crushed to fit within it. His family’s show is for him, always, even if it makes them abjectly miserable.

Here’s where Churchill’s dizzying casting drives home the point. Clive’s wife, Betty, swans across the stage, fanning herself with horror at the suggestion that she might have legs under her skirts. She’s the picture of dainty, subservient femininity in every way except that she’s played by a man (a very on-point Tavish Forsyth). Poor little Edward (Barbara Madison Hauck) is cruelly treated by his father because of his “girly” affectations, but we can plainly see that “Edward” is a grown woman, so it doesn’t track.

Joshua, played by Nick Fruit, is Clive’s African servant, who Clive describes: “You’d hardly notice the fellow was black.” And indeed we would not, as Fruit is white. Joshua himself says: “My skin is black but oh my soul is white” and for him, appearing as “white” as possible, and drawing a distinction between himself and other Africans, is a matter of literal survival, as we learn that local indigenous people, including Joshua’s own family members, are being put to death at the direction of the white imperialists. Clive is sexist, homophobic, and racist, all of which Churchill suggests serves the same purpose: to repress the Other and uphold his own supremacy.

Add to all this that Churchill wrote a quick sexual farce, so it’s deliberately hard to keep everyone straight (pun intended). There are marital affairs, cunnilingus in the drawing room, shocking admissions of illicit desire. If Churchill can disrupt our expectations and perceptions, she will.

Act two jumps forward 100 years in time, and the characters age too, albeit at a slower rate. They’re about 25 years older, and the sexual repression that fuels the first act has given way to a newfound sense of liberation—in other words, the characters are experiencing a significant cultural jump within a quarter of a lifetime. But formative experiences are hard to shake, and as much as we may try to resist the horribly outdated attitudes of our parents, they sometimes seem hardwired into our DNA.

Take, for example, Betty’s daughter, Victoria (Kristina Szilagyi). Victoria is a literal doll in the first act; inanimate, completely without voice or autonomy. In the second, we see her struggle to escape this learned passivity, particularly in her relationship with her husband, Martin, played by Jonas David Grey. Grey almost walks off with the show with his hilarious delivery of lines like “I’m writing a novel about women from the women’s point of view.” He’s the kind of man who is so busy mansplaining to women about letting them talk that he forgets to actually let them talk. Martin’s first act mirror, Harry Bagley (also played by Grey), is an explorer who “explores” everyone and everything. Martin is exploring too, trying on the suit of a “woke” guy, until it turns out he might have to give up some of his unearned privilege, at which he immediately balks: “I was all for the ‘60s when liberation just meant fucking.”

Churchill dives into how disorienting an evolving social structure can be, how it’s hard to break free of oppressive rules because there’s comfort in the familiar, even though we may hate ourselves for indulging in that comfort. Lin (a grounded Kathryne Daniels) embraces a sexuality that her first act counterpart, Ellen (also Daniels), is denied, but she doesn’t know how to express it on her own terms: “I changed who I sleep with, I can’t change everything.” Edward (now played by Forsyth) and his lover, Gerry (Fruit, relaxed and strong), fight over the idea of marriage: Edward yearns to be not just a partner, but a wife, and Gerry rejects that dynamic in their relationship. Betty (now Hauck) free falls in the aftermath of her separation from Clive, unsure who she is in the absence of a man to perform for.

The script is not without flaws. It’s a little overlong, for one thing, and shows its age in places. Why a play from the past has been resurrected is always a question, even more so when it’s a play whose once-radical politics have perhaps not held up well 40 years later. Churchill attempts to create context for a white man to play Joshua, for example, but it’s difficult to justify, especially because she doesn’t really address race again after the first act. No matter how you slice it, a white actor playing a black character is never going to avoid the wincing overtones of a minstrel show (especially considering that Churchill herself is white). She also draws some outdated lines between queerness and pedophilia: Edward is sexually abused in his youth by his uncle, and because Churchill never clearly underlines subsequent trauma or fallout from this, it seems like she uses their relationship as just another indicator that Edward has been obviously queer since childhood.

But director Dr. Natka Bianchini does restrain the show, and insofar as its central caricatured conceit can be subtle, the production resists muging and winking; the acting is rarely overly emphasized or cartoonish. The cast walks the line, at times brilliantly, between character and caricature, grounding the show and saving it from a descent into the full-stop offensive or ridiculous.

As we’ve seen a number of cleavings between generations lately—evidenced in debates between Civil Rights Leaders and the new vanguard, Black Lives Matter, or between younger and older women it comes to certain feminist principles—what feels outdated to some feels progressive to others. Maybe the problem is not so much with the play itself, but its audiences, some of whom will see this as cutting-edge commentary instead of what it really is: a decades-old piece of radical theater. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but it is a different one.

“Cloud 9,” written by Caryl Churchill and directed by Natka Bianchini for Iron Crow Theatre, runs through Feb. 4 at Baltimore Theatre Project. For more information, visit ironcrowtheatre.org.

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There’s a scene in the “Mad Men” episode ‘Ladies Room’ that’s brutal in its simplicity. Two frustrated, male advertising executives sit in leather-clad chairs clutching brandy glasses. “What do women want?” one asks the other. His friend scoffs and takes a beat before replying: “Who cares?”

And there it is. Six words of male dialogue to neatly sum up a patriarchal imperative: Unless their desires sell lipstick or skinny margarita mix, what real man truly cares what women want at all?

This is the smarmy challenge that women constantly face both personally and professionally. We often have to fight to prove that our aspirations, frustrations, and flaws are just as varied, important, and intense as those of the men in our lives. Even in local theater, women’s voices are too rarely prioritized. An analysis done by Brent Englar, Dramatists Guild’s regional representative for Baltimore, followed 33 Baltimore-area theater companies over 122 productions from 2016 to 2017. Of those 122 plays, 40 (33 percent) were directed by women, and only 34 (28 percent) written by women. Not too fucking impressive in terms of gender parity.

In light of Englar’s study, Rapid Lemon’s production of Audrey Cefaly’s short play collection “Love is a Blue Tick Hound and Other Remedies for the Common Ache,” staged at Baltimore Theatre Project as a part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival (which is based in Washington, D.C. but includes programming in Baltimore through Rapid Lemon, Center Stage, and The Strand), takes on more significance. Not only is the playwright a woman, but so are six of the eight actors in the show, and all of the pieces (“Hound” is a compilation of four short plays) are women-directed.

Not surprisingly, then, the female characters here feel more real than they typically do in more frequently produced, male-authored plays. They talk and act like people you might actually know, not a monolith of rabid high-heel consumers binge-watching old episodes of “Sex in the City.” Cefaly is an Alabamian native, and considers herself a “Southern playwright.” Her roots are evident in her work. Cefaly’s women are from different walks of life: They range from second daters in upscale apartments to waitresses in cheap Italian restaurants to beer-swilling fisherwomen. They’re just ordinary, in a way I rarely see on stage. And in their very averageness, Cefaly uncovers truth, humor, and an aching desire to be heard.

Most successful of the four short plays are ‘Fin and Euba’ and ‘The Gulf.’ ‘Fin and Euba’ finds two women (played by Carolyn Koch and Lauren Erica Jackson) sitting on lawn chairs in a yard littered with tacky ornaments. It quickly becomes obvious that Fin is projecting her upwardly mobile ambitions onto her unwilling friend, hoping that by unsticking Euba, she might unstick herself. Euba is the perfect example of the type of complexity with which Cefaly imbues her female characters. She clearly hates her life, but she isn’t willing to take a chance on a risk, nor is she able to envision herself in a better situation. The hard part is that she might be right: Dreams are great, but don’t always lead to a happy ending. Koch and Jackson use a lot of physical shorthand (best friends talk so much more with their eyes) to good effect. Their catharsis feels earned.

Cefaly uses this structure again in ‘The Gulf,’ but this time, the two women, Kendra and Betty (Donna Ibale and Aladrian C. Wetzel), are lovers. Betty pushes Kendra, a sewage plant worker, to better herself, not realizing that “better” for Betty isn’t the same as “better” for Kendra. Director Betse Lyons mines a lot of drama out of the claustrophobic environment of a small fishing boat, building the tension to a breaking point. Betty and Kendra’s conflict and eventual resolution is satisfying because we believe their relationship 100 percent.

The other two pieces, ‘Clean’ and ‘Stuck,’ are a little less thematically interesting. ‘Clean’ centers around Lina (Lyons, in a terrific, affecting performance), a waitress who feels invisible, but is seen more clearly than she imagines by an Italian dishwasher named Roberto (Justin Johnson). ‘Stuck,’ a parable on Internet dating and authenticity, is the most laugh-out-loud of the pieces, mostly due to the excellent comic timing of Mike Smith and Lee Conderacci.

“What do women want?” is an unanswerable question. Women are people, and people’s wants and needs are wildly different. Cefaly’s work shines brightest when it illuminates the complex and rich relationships between women, when it acknowledges that, whatever it is that women want, we will need each other to get there. “God never gives us more than we can handle,” says Fin to her best friend in ‘Fin and Euba.’ She considers, then quickly amends: “Sometimes it’s just a little bit more than we can handle. But that’s why we have each other.”

“Love is a Blue Tick Hound” continues Jan. 18-21 at Baltimore Theatre Project.

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As we sit sipping pre-show drinks at the bar downstairs at the Crown, in front of a stage decorated with some of the most depressing Christmas trees I’ve ever seen, Tommy Gunn somehow makes me feel like I’m in a Winter Wonderland. As creative director and stage manager for Bunns of Steele Productions, the burlesque company behind the recurring “Burl-eoke” shows at The Crown, Gunn’s enthusiasm is infectious. When I ask what makes Bunns of Steele different from other troupes, his answer is a jaunty: “Well, you’re not gonna see burlesque as goofy as this.”

If you don’t know what “Burl-eoke” is, don’t worry; it was practically invented by the company’s founders, Bunny Vicious and Twiggy Steele. The concept is a kicky blend of karaoke, burlesque, and improv. At the mid-December holiday edition of “Burl-eoke,” several (pre-selected) singers compete in the first round by performing prepared Christmas tunes to karaoke tracks, and one is eliminated by audience vote. In the second, the remaining singers are paired up at random with burlesque dancers to form teams. The dancers have no idea what they will be dancing to, the singers little more what they will sing. In the third round, the difficulty increases as Gunn, who also serves as MC, introduces “challenges” like eating popcorn as they perform, or a “backwards burlesque” where the dancer has to put their clothes on. In between rounds, company members give lap dances and sing silly songs.

The structure of the event helps keep the whole thing from going stale, sometimes a problem

with straightforward burlesque, which can feel like an endless string of pretty ladies biting their gloves and peeling their stockings. There’s also a refreshing diversity of performers involved; Gunn is quick to note that the company is a “body positive environment” and that does seem true, as there were lots of different body types on stage, all united by fluffy red marabou. Bunns of Steele also disrupts the focus on women’s bodies found in traditional burlesque: Gunn dances, as does Danny Carbo, a “boylesque” performer who does a sexy routine to “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” no easy feat.

Song choices range between Lee Conderacci’s pop-punk snarl on Blink 182’s ‘I Won’t Be Home for Christmas’ to the sultry vocals of CynDiva Harcum’s take on ‘Merry Christmas Baby.’ And if you think that dancing to something like this would be cut rate, you’re dead wrong. Some of it is, true to Gunn’s word, goofy—I won’t soon forget the burlesque-styled Christmas tree in five-inch red heels—and some, like Tempete La Coeur’s on-the-spot improvisation to ‘Let it Snow,’ classic and elegant. And as someone who can barely put her clothes on in the morning without fucking it up, I’m impressed by the dancers’ ability to shed that last piece of clothing on the beat—burlesque is truly all about the timing of the pasties.

Despite a few technical difficulties, the evening holds together, and that is largely due to the company’s warmth and clear joy in what they do. There are as many enthusiastic hugs onstage as there are butt tassels, and so you can’t help but root for them. By the time Conderacci and Viscous are crowned the winning team, the entire audience is feeling it, interacting with the performers as Gunn encouraged us to do during the “Burlesque 101” info session at the top of the show.

As Bunny Vicious unbuckles the clasps on her green satin corset and Bitesize Aria spins in mounds of angelic tulle, both on stage for the show’s finale (a Mariah Carey-fueled dueling duet), the energy in the room surges. Audience participation is a must at a burlesque show, but right now, we don’t need to be told what to do. Amid claps and hollers, whistles and stomps, the singers throw themselves into the high notes as the dancers triumphantly twirl and flash to the music. If Gunn says anything important as he grabs the mic back, I don’t hear it. By that time, it’s all just part of the blissed-out blur.

Bunns of Steele produces multiple events a year, including several “Burl-eoke” nights at The Crown—look out for Valentine’s Day and 4/20 shows, among others, coming up in 2018. Go to sluttytimes.com to check out the company’s new weekly podcast, premiering on Dec. 21 at 11 p.m. For more information on Bunns of Steele, visit bosburlesque.com.

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