Exactly how steamy is this story?
R, or NC-17
No getting around it. This is one raunchy play. Now for much of the play, you don't actually see any sex. But in the second act, there's a pretty intense orgy that involves people offering to do certain things to strangers' privates without a care in the world of contracting STIs (or getting arrested for public exposure; they're doin' it in the park, guys). Oh, and this orgy involves brother/sister incest. How explicit this scene gets is at the discretion of the director and the owners of whatever theater is producing the play, we guess.
And be forewarned: Cloud 9 doesn't just involve consensual sex. There's a really creepy pedophilic element. Edward (a child in Act 1) spends a scene trying to convince the adult Harry to repeat a sexual encounter. It's made ickier by the fact that it's a child (incapable of consent by virtue of being a freaking child) that is doing the "seduction." Yuck, yuck, yuckity yuck.
What else? "What'dya got?," asks Churchill. Let's just list the sex acts, implied or otherwise:
One-on-one heterosexual sex
One-on-one homosexual sex
Masturbation
Incest
Necrophilia
Pedophilia
Adultery
Non-consensual sex
Threesomes
Anonymous sex
Orgies
Oh yeah, and our personal candidate for Weirdest Sex Act: Ghost incest. This comes up when Lin's dead brother wants to join the park orgy. He's sexually frustrated because he wasn't getting any in the army.
Churchill isn't here to make us comfortable. She's here to make us really, really question our ideas about gender and sexuality. So if you're keen on questioning, give this brilliant play a read. But if anything from the list above sounds potentially triggering, or if you're looking for a good book to read with your grandfather or use for a grade-school book report, look elsewhere.