Column: Dialogue, on stage and off

"Cloud 9 includes and provokes dialogue about sex, gender, and race." That's on the poster for Cloud 9, the Duke Theater Studies Department's fall show. I'm in it. The disclaimer is just general enough to keep from scaring patrons, while serving as a warning for those who might have brought their parents, but I think a simple "This show includes lots of screwing" would have been just as effective. My mother and 12-year-old sister drove down for opening night. I invited professors.

I didn't consider that I was performing in such a controversial show until a few weeks before opening, when in an interview I was asked about my qualms with the material. Although my immediate response was that I was of course fine with it, how silly to even ask, I began to consider the implications of my characters, and what a viewer less entrenched in the ideas behind the show than I would think. In the first act, I play a nine-year-old boy molested by a family friend (and enjoying it) in British colonial Africa, and in the second, a late-50s woman, recently single, who has a monologue late in the show about rediscovering the joys of masturbation. To me, these characters make sense-I allow them to inhabit my skin, after all.

Rehearsals became nerve-wracking, especially when we moved into Reynolds Theater, our performance space, which seats 600. Sitting on my cube, preparing my monologue, I would look into a sea of empty seats, imagine faces there, and rub my palms together to counteract the cold sweats.

I got over it during tech week, when our stage manager turned off the house lights, and forgetting the audience seemed plausible. We began getting into our costumes, putting on our characters and things on stage began to click-seven weeks and hundreds of hours of preparation finally showing their effects. The audience response I felt was positive, with laughs and uneasy shifts in the seat in all the right places, although I was later told that some parents left the theater mid-scene.

Cloud 9 is not an easy play. It asks its audience not only to accept its characters and sometimes outrageous behavior, but also to accept after intermission what seems like an entirely new play. It asks of its actors not only two parts and an enormous donation of energy, but an unusual understanding and thought about its issues.

Although our poster says Cloud 9 "includes and provokes dialogue," that buzzword that scares so many of us and makes us avert our eyes from the chalk on the BC Walkway, does the play really do that? It includes the dialogue, sure, but I've yet to have someone ask me how we reconciled that the show includes molestation, adultery and cruising without apology. Although some of my friends admitted to being uncomfortable, no one has really said why. I feel like we're both desensitized and repressed, feeling more comfortable than we should, but unable to discuss our existing qualms.

One of the reasons I tried out for the show, besides challenging myself as actor, was that the script is provocative and unabashedly open. I wanted to hear people gasp, seats creak and a huge silence at the end of the show (followed, of course, by thunderous applause). I'm not sure if I should be glad that our reception has been so positive. I'm happy to get the praise, but I wonder: If not even bisexual incest (although there's argument among the cast about whether it's "real" incest-see, dialogue!) can cause an audience to gasp, what can? Our director described seeing Cloud 9 in 1981 and his amazement at its sheer newness-these were things that had never before been discussed on stage. That's not true any more, but they're still things not often discussed in life. How else can we get people talking?

Opening night, I left the theater and met my mom and little sister in the lobby.