"A boy has no business having feelings," says the bombastic Victorian patriarch Clive (David Travis) to his son Edward (Jennifer Sun), who is crying because his doll was taken away. But in fact at the boys and men in "Cloud Nine" are full of feelings--usually lusty and often for each other--which they indulge at every opportunity.

The women also go beyond their duty to the empire: not only do they "lie still and think of England," but they pursue the men, and each other, with tireless voracity. In the second act, which is set in 1979 London, the frolics include an orgy in which Clive's daughter Victoria (Cori Lynn Peterson) invokes Ishtar while romping with her gay brother Edward (now played by Brain van Gorder) and her lesbian lover Lynn (Vonnie Roemer).

All this, and a plot too.

The first act is set in Victorian colonial Africa and revolves around the sexual tensions disrupting the "perfect" household of Clive and his wife Betty (Brain van Gorder). The casting in this play frequently crosses gender and racial lines, and in the first act this seems to indicate that Clive and his imperialistic patriarchal attempts to "tame" women and the Dark Continent have distorted the true natures of the other characters.

Thus Betty (played by a man) describes herself as "a man's creation," and Clive's "black" servant/protege (played by the blond John Knepper) insists that "my soul is white" and "I hate my tribe." Edward is supposed to be a boy but is played by a girl, which accords well with his "sissy" traits like playing with dolls and hating his father's bullying ways.

Enter Clive's friend Harry Bagley (Robert de Neufville), a middle-aged Banana poster-boy with a handlebar mustache. Betty wants him, really wants him, but he decides he'd rather have her as a pure inspiration than a roll in the hay.

It soon becomes clear, however, that Bagley's real reason for turning her down is that he secretly craves another kind of liberation from British family values: sex with boys. His first meeting with Joshua runs like this:

"The barn is all clear, sir."

"Shall we go in the barn and fuck, then? That's not an order."

"That would be all right, sir."

For Edward, Bagley provides liberation as well. Telling Bagley that he loves him, the boy gives him Betty's necklace and then says wistfully,

"You know what we did when you were here before? I want to do again. I try to do it myself but it's not as good."

And they go off stage to do it. Hey, at least they go offstage. That's not the case with Clive and Mrs. Saunders (Vonnie Roemer), a widow who enjoys flogging. Clive expresses passions for her that have no place in the patronizing domesticity of his marriage. She resists his advances at first, but to no avail. Undeterred, Clive sticks his head under her skirt and they have a jolly good time.

Meanwhile, Betty is fending off the advances of her children's governess Ellen (Vonnie Roemer), whom she eventually marries off to Bagley with advice that movingly highlights the Victorian woman's deprivation of sexual pleasure and knowledge. "Just keep still," she advises the bride to be, while knowing that even she is beginning to want more than that.

The second act transports the characters into 1979, but everyone's aged only 25 years. The actors have exchanged roles in a convoluted fashion: