“Betty, Clive’s wife, is played by a man because she wants to be what men want her to be,” Caryl Churchill writes in an introduction to the script of her energetic yet elegiac gender-fender-bender Cloud 9 of 1979. “And, in the same way, Joshua, the black servant, is played by a white man because he wants to be what whites want him to be. Betty does not value herself as a woman, nor does Joshua value himself as a black.” That logic may have seemed less squishy back at the tail end of the Sexual Revolution then it does today, but happily Churchill had more on her mind than hip clichés. Act One of Cloud 9 takes us to Africa, where Betty’s Victorian-colonialist husband is losing his battle against the anarchy burbling up among the country’s Africans as well as within his own family. Act Two teleports us to London a century later, but Betty and other characters held over from Act One are just 25 years older (and played by different actors). Are you dizzy yet? Cloud 9 reached New York in an Off Broadway production directed by Tommy Tune, who gave Churchill’s veddy British dialogue the same fizz and lift of the new that with-it theater fans were loving in the scores of Stephen Sondheim—notably Follies, which nine seasons ago played the National Theatre in a triumphant revival directed by Dominic Cooke. And now—fasten your seat belts!—Cooke’s at the controls for the National’s Cloud 9. Up, up, and away! —Matthew Gurewitsch