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I am also in agreement that this production was truly powerful. The children were so talented in the sense that they were able to really capture these dark truths and bring light to them. Like what one of the members of the Gob Squad was saying during the Q&A, they really tried to bring a lighter touch to things like disappointment and death, and I really think they did a fabulous job of doing so.
I was also very impressed with how real the production felt. I mean, as the kids “grew up” in their performance, they turned into people they didn’t plan on becoming. I feel like I could really relate to that where I feel like there are times I’m not on the path I had expected for myself. I also feel like as children, many have these high expectations for what their life is destined to include, but rarely do things end up so neatly.
I very much agree with your impression of the performance. Act II was definitely a bit harder to follow than Act I. For me, I think that a lot of the difficulty came from not getting a clear perception of time and setting in the second Act. We are told in the description of the play that it is now in the 1970s in London, but for the characters only 25 years have passed. This was an odd concept to wrap my head around, and if it weren’t for that description, I doubt I would have picked up on that at all in the performance.
The gender roles in both acts definitely did stand out though, and I feel that the second act really gave way from the first act by showing that now there was more freedom to explore other realms of love and affection. Despite that, though, I found it interesting that the characters that did break out of their shells to explore other loves, like Victoria and Cathy, ended up not being as happy as expected, bringing a sense of irony to the title Cloud Nine. And personally, I feel that Victoria’s character showed the progression of the female over many years. In the first act, she was represented as a doll, the perfect daughter because she never spoke for herself. In the second act, she starts to take the reign on her own life, but despite the fact that we are in a whole new era, she still has to deal with an oppressive patriarchal institution.
