When English playwright Caryl Churchill debuted Cloud 9 in 1979, it landed like a flashbang. In the mid-'90s, when I was in grad school, her work was still buzzed about in feminist theater circles. Top Girls made a similar splash in 1982. Then as now, a great deal of breath, ink and mental effort were expended trying to make sense of her narrative dream logic, postmodern thinkiness and refusal to conform to audience expectations. Thirty years later, they're still cutting edge. Director Olivia Baumgartner, a senior at Saint Martin's, appears to relish Cloud 9's provocative pansexuality. It's a play that refuses to condemn any sexual behavior, including pedophilia. I don't know when I've felt an Olympia audience squirm so consistently, even as they were laughing.

Our story begins in the late 19th century, when imperial England dominated much of the African continent. Clive (Kyle Henick) moved his family to the veldt in a misguided macho crusade, but now the indigenous tribes are fighting back. Clive's servant, Joseph, is a black man who wishes to be white. Adding to our discomfort is the fact that Joseph is played here, as Churchill requested, by a white man (Colin Chambers). Churchill was fond of Brechtian meta-theater, so it's fitting that Chambers is masked. Joshua removes his African mask when he feels the most powerful, and, as seems inevitable, Act I ends on a racially ominous note.

Act II follows the same characters, except now it's 1979 and the characters are a mere generation older and the actors swapped roles. Somehow this is less confusing than it sounds, partly because Clive's restless wife Betty was already played by a man in Act I, and little boy Edward was played by a woman-again, as Churchill intended. I do wish sophomore Grace Caruso found a way to differentiate her three characters more; their similarity made her scenes in Act I bewildering.

More than anything, Cloud 9 is about the oppression of expectations. Clive and his British Empire have a preconceived notion of how women should be, so no other kind of woman is tolerated. Clive and Enlgand justify the invasion of Africa by insisting they're bringing civilization to savages; ergo, they see only savages. By refusing to discuss homosexuality, Clive and his ilk can dismiss homosexuals as deliberate perverts. We know only what we let ourselves see.

When Baumgartner chose her play, there's no way she could've known "legitimate rape" and "shutting that whole thing down" would emerge as campaign buzzwords. I can't believe we're still debating whether women should earn equal pay for equal work, or uteri auto-terminate pregnancies from rape, or God works through sexual assault. Sadly, while this play was directed at England 30 years ago, turns out it has plenty to say about 21st-century America, too. Kinda sad, don't you think?

MIDNIGHT SUN PERFORMANCE SPACE, CLOUD 9, THROUGH NOV. 17, 7:30 P.M. WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY, $7-$12, 113 N. COLUMBIA ST., OLYMPIA, 360.438.4345