Up in the Air on Cloud Nine

"God knows I do everything I can to make you stand on your own two feet. Just be yourself. You don't seem to realize how insulting it is to me that you can't get yourself together." - Martin (from Caryl Churchill's "Cloud Nine")

As part of our subscription service, though not a part of the regular season, Mirvish Productions provided us with two tickets to "Cloud Nine" at the Panasonic theatre on Friday night. It looked like an interesting and promising night of entertainment. The play is set in two acts, the first act in 1879 in Colonial Africa; the second act in 1979 in Margaret Thatcher's England. The characters remain the same from act to act and though one hundred years have passed, the characters are only twenty five years older. It is quite sexually explicit, exploring several different tastes. Men play women and women play men. Adults play children. Blacks play whites and whites play blacks. The first act was quite entertaining. But Act II left me bewildered. At times the acting was flat and even at the best of times, I found myself working far too hard to understand what was going on. Merv didn't get it either so I know it wasn't just me.

On Saturday we headed off to the cinema to see George Clooney's most recent movie, "Up in the Air". The movie is an interesting hybrid of comedy and drama. I can relate to George's role as the "terminator". I've been there too many times. I can even relate to flying in to do the deed and then flying out again a few hours later. It reminds me of a downsizing I did once in Vancouver - about a dozen people in two hours. I flew into Vancouver on flight leaving Toronto in the early morning hours and flew back to Toronto the same afternoon. Twelve hours of flight time left me with just a couple of hours in the Vancouver Bank of America office.

While there are some very funny moments in the film, it also provides a view of the dark side - the pain and angst for both the terminator and the terminated. But more than being about employment loss, the film is about relationships and the normal human need for connection. As the film is only showing in two suburban theatres, I would guess that it will soon be out of theatres all together and released on DVD. If you get a chance to see it, it is definitely worth the price of admission.