The Cloud Walkers

 

SYNOPSIS

 

The Cloud Walkers evokes a specific time and place yet movingly describes the universal human condition: How we fight our way through history and finally into our hearts. The terrain of the play is the life and poetry of the English poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) whose neo-Romantic poems and premature death in World War One contributed to his fame and idealized image. Brooke served as an officer in the British Royal Navy and died of blood poisoning on a hospital ship anchored off the Greek island of Skyros. The play’s subject is the ties that bind each of us to those people and places we hold most dear, the gifts and betrayals of the body, the wars fought by soldiers and poets, and what goes unsaid.

 

The Cloud Walkers wrings every last drop of warmth and frustration out of life, lovers, nurses, gravediggers, mothers, the poetry of Rupert Brooke. Probing an eclectic, intimately imagined cast of characters, including Virginia Woolf, Brooke’s nurse, Winston Churchill's speechwriter, old friends and lovers, the play weaves together harrowing but ultimately consoling monologues and scenes of childhood memories, lives undone and recovered humanity.

 

Seven exhilarating stories about finding your place in the world—be it this one, or the world of the heart—that offer an engrossing and lyrical mosaic of human experience.

 

"My son made himself into two men. One of them is buried somewhere in the land of a Greek island. I don’t know anything about this man. I can tell you about the other one. In his sleep, his head often nestled in the nook between my shoulder and neck. And I curled my arm around him to help him snuggle against my breasts. His fingers twitched against my waist, and I felt loved, even if his love for me came from the depths of his dreams. This was my son. This is love: a boy’s muscle.  Love is the feeling that a boy can use his muscle to stir his fingers and touch you. Even from the depths of his dreams. Even from the depths of the earth in an olive grove on a Greek island." (Mary Ruth Brooke, The Cloud Walkers)