Child's play
Ann-Marie MacDonald channels her inner boy in the gender-bending satire Cloud 9
Last Updated: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | 1:07 PM ET
By Martin Morrow, CBC News
Ann-Marie MacDonald, right, plays nine-year-old Edward, who wishes he were a girl, and Blair Williams is a bisexual African explorer in the gender-bending comedy Cloud 9. (Cylla von Tiedemann/Mirvish Productions)As an author, Ann-Marie MacDonald has never had a problem seeing through the eyes of a child. Both of her best-selling novels, Fall On Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, adopted the viewpoints of children and teenagers. As an actor, however, MacDonald has discovered that embodying a kid can be more of a challenge. Especially when that kid is a boy who wishes he were a girl.
MacDonald plays Edward, a nine-year-old British lad in 19th-century colonial Africa, in a major new Canadian revival of Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill’s gender-bending comedy about sexual identity. Like most of the characters in Churchill’s play, Edward is a victim of Victorian repression – he’d rather play with his sister’s doll, but risks being branded a sissy by his manly father, Clive (David Jansen).
'When she was writing plays [like Cloud 9] I think they were cutting-edge and ahead of their time. Now they feel timeless – and timely.'
—Ann-Marie MacDonald on Caryl Churchill
To play the role, “I channel my inner nine-year-old boy,” jokes McDonald during a recent interview at Toronto’s Panasonic Theatre, where the show opens on Jan. 26. She’s looking, um, boyish with her signature Peter Pan haircut, an orange fleece and jeans.
“The trouble is, my inner nine-year-old boy doesn’t play with dolls,” she explains. “He doesn’t want to be a girl. So I had to channel my inner nine-year-old girl, who is inside a boy. It’s very confusing.”
In the end, however, MacDonald found a connection with Edward. Just as he struggles with his father’s traditional expectations of masculinity, MacDonald, who grew up a tomboy in the 1960s, fought off the dolls, dresses and other feminine trappings foisted on little girls.
“What I was rebelling against was an enforced version of femininity,” she says. “So I was able to draw on that for poor Edward, who finds himself really constricted.”
Churchill’s play, first produced in London in 1979, is a landmark in its exploration of sex, race and the changing face of the family. Act 1, set in 1880 Africa, is a spoof of colonialist attitudes and Victorian hang-ups. The second act, set in 1980 England, is a more serious take on the fallout of the sexual revolution. Both feature the same family members who, in a bit of theatrical sleight-of-hand, have only aged 25 years between acts.
That’s not the only trick Churchill plays. She also requires the actors to swap sex and race. So, while MacDonald is portraying Edward, a male actor (Evan Buliung) is cast as Betty, Edward’s prim Victorian mother. Then there’s Joshua, their faithful African servant, played by Ben Carlson, a Caucasian. Black actor Yanna McIntosh, meanwhile, is Betty’s white mother. Megan Follows, as a lesbian governess, and Blair Williams, as a bisexual explorer, round out the stellar ensemble of Stratford and Shaw festival alumni.
Popular director Alisa Palmer, MacDonald’s wife, is staging Cloud 9 for Mirvish Productions. It's a welcome followup to her hit 2007 revival of Top Girls, another vintage Churchill play, produced by Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre and also featuring MacDonald. Both women are fans of U.K. playwright Churchill, who at 70 is the godmother of contemporary feminist theatre. “When she was writing these plays, I think they were cutting-edge and ahead of their time,” MacDonald says. “Now they feel timeless – and timely.”
Like Top Girls, a Thatcher-era meditation on women and power, Cloud 9 still speaks to audiences today. While the play’s gay and lesbian characters and its subject matter – from oral sex to pederasty – may no longer be as shocking, its issues haven’t gone away.
“There are still laws being passed making homosexuality punishable, like in Uganda,” Palmer says. “There continue to be issues about child abuse and the legacy of colonization, even here in Canada with our indigenous people. Those central themes of the play are absolutely alive and well, unfortunately. It’s still pertinent.”
Director Alisa Palmer. (Mirvish Productions)In other ways, though, Cloud 9 is very much a creature of the late 1970s. In the second act – when all the actors take on new roles – MacDonald plays the middle-aged Betty and delivers a classic monologue about her character’s belated sexual awakening. Performing it makes the 51-year-old MacDonald nostalgic.
“I remember being a young feminist back then,” she says, “in the second wave, I guess it’s called – that really explosive, creative flowering of feminist art, where the personal was political. And where a 55-year-old woman finally discovering she can have an orgasm on her own will change the world!" she declaims with mock gravitas. "And actually did,” she adds as an aside. “But we hear it differently now. Now the 20-somethings can sit there and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s my mother talking! I’m so embarrassed and happy for her.’”
The feminist flowering MacDonald speaks of also seeded her first big writing success: 1988’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), a hyper-clever Shakespeare parody that empowered its titular tragic heroines. MacDonald topped that much-produced play a decade later with her impressive debut novel, the Oprah Winfrey-touted Fall On Your Knees. (The book is part of this year’s Canada Reads competition on CBC Radio.)
Since then, MacDonald – a graduate of the National Theatre School – has become better known as a writer than an actor. Palmer has succeeded in luring her back onstage a few times in recent years, from starring in a 2001 CanStage revival of Goodnight Desdemona to doing the Churchill plays.
Palmer says that being a married couple has proved an asset when they work together. “We joke that it’s actually easier because our roles are already really clear. She says I’m mercilessly analytical and I think she needs a great deal of attention. So it works out well: when I’m directing her, I can give her all my attention, and she has to put up with all my analysis.”
MacDonald (right) as the middle-aged Betty, with David Jansen in the second act of Cloud 9. (Cylla von Tiedemann/Mirvish Productions) The two never take their work home with them. They have two little daughters to care for, so they wouldn’t have the time anyway. “We have to think about, What are we having for supper? Is there a piano lesson tomorrow?” MacDonald says. “Besides, we observe an unspoken etiquette that we don’t talk about what the other actors are doing. If there’s a big crisis, you don’t tell me,” she says, turning to Palmer. “I’m shielded from a lot of that.”
MacDonald and Palmer have another play collaboration on the go. They’re developing a sequel to The Attic, the Pearls & Three Fine Girls, the sibling comedy they created collectively with Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak and Martha Ross in 1995. The script was given a public reading at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in November. MacDonald, a seasoned TV host, also fronts the Doc Zone series for CBC.
Her novel writing, however, is on hold for the moment. She says her first two books were so time-consuming and labour-intensive, she hesitates to embark on another one. “I’ll probably start working on some prose at some point, but I’m not champing at the bit,” she says. “I’m really enjoying being an actor again.”
She’s also enjoying the job of being a parent of two little girls. Her old tomboy-cum-feminist side has become reconciled to the dolls and dresses.
“I’m much mellower than I would have been if I’d had my daughters when I was 25,” she says. “I probably would have been quite militantly anti-pink and anti-Barbie. But now I go, ‘Oh, sure, there’s room for all that, as long as you’re having a good time and growing as a person.’”
Cloud 9 runs at the Panasonic Theatre in Toronto to Feb. 21.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.
