["Cloud 9"] may not transport the audience all the way to Cloud 9—but it surely keeps us on our toes. The evening's subject is sexual confusion, and Miss Churchill has found a theatrical method that is easily as dizzying as her theme. Not only does she examine a cornucopia of sexual permutations—from heterosexual adultery right up to bisexual incest—but she does so with a wild array of dramatic styles and tricks….

Miss Churchill, as you might gather, is one daft writer. "Cloud 9" … has real failings, but intelligence and inventiveness aren't among them; we're always interested in what the playwright is up to, no matter what the outcome….

[The first] half of "Cloud 9" is about what happens when a very proper colonial British family receives a visit from a pith-helmeted explorer named Harry Bagley…. While the natives outside the camp are getting restless, they have nothing on the...