Balagan Theatre burst out of the womb of the Capitol Hill Arts Center last week with the opening of their new season in the La Spiga building at the corner of Pike and 12th. "Three weeks ago this was a concrete box," someone said before the performance, "and thanks to the hard work of many people, today it's a concrete box with curtains." It's actually pretty fly for a concrete box with curtains.

The play Cloud 9 is a great pick for Seattle, consisting of a first act that revolves around colonialism (huh) and a second based on nontraditional gender roles (there we go). No one hates a farce like Seattlest hates a farce, but if the first act of Cloud 9 tells us anything it's that Seattlest may not hate a farce as much as we like to think. It could be that we finally folded under the weight of the relentless script and acting (occasionally hamming), or the purposefully miscast roles (a dude as a woman, a woman as a dude, a white guy as a black guy, a doll as a girl) which, by rights, should have been a smirk-worthy one-time gag, but actually worked well throughout. Or it could be that the whole thing--although, the first act chiefly--is pretty funny.

It's a pretty harsh transition here between the humorously-told sobering events of the first act where we follow the lives of an English family in Colonial Africa to the soberly-told modern-day London story of the second.

All the characters of the first act are grown up now (instead of grown, buried, their kids grown and buried as the time line should actually entail) and cast according to type. The guy's playing the guy now, and everyone's been able to own up to their various sexualities to varying degrees, but it's still somehow not a picnic in the park (or if it is, it's a drunken, incestuous orgy in the park). It's still complicated, still a struggle. Maybe more upfront and out in the open than in the first act where everyone lived under the crushing oppression of the patriarch, but still a struggle. Are we supposed to come away feeling that this stuff (gender roles, gender identity) is hard because we had it so messed up in the past, or that it's just hard because it's hard and we're still a long way from having it figured out? Almost everyone's situation is vastly improved in the second act, but there's no air in the triumphs of the openly-gay relationships, newly-empowered divorcées and single-mothers. No one's got it made, even now, particularly the poor hetero male; once the towering, philandering head of the home, now the mushy and accommodating Seattle guy.

Cloud 9 plays Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm through Nov. 10. Tickets are $15.