Sex makes the world go ’round in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine. The catch is that there are two worlds. The first half of British playwright Churchill’s concupiscent comedy of manners is set in 1880 Africa, where British colonialist Clive serves as great white father to both his proper Victorian family and the natives. Act two moves ahead a century (though the carry-over characters age just 25 years) to the swinging London of 1980, where a cadre of moderns try to come to terms with a world where liberation, not repression, is the watchword.

When Churchill’s 1979 play was first unleashed, boldly satirized past gave way to earnest if comic present, where characters were trying to find themselves on a brand new map. Now, in the era of The Vagina Monologues (where Churchill’s conclusion would fit like a tampon), both halves of the play are period pieces, the first a lampoon of fault-ridden Victorian hierarchy, the second a nostalgic look back at the sometimes befuddling halcyon days of gay and women’s liberation. And they are so played at Trinity Rep, in a production that makes the hilarious most of the play’s designated gender-bent and other manner of mixed-up casting while at the same time achieving a bittersweetness. Even in the first half, which practically screams Charles Ludlam, there is, in Tony Taccone’s staging, a tinge of Athol Fugard. It’s hard to guess why Trinity opted to revive Cloud Nine, which it produced in a more timely manner in 1984, rather than take on a tougher, more recent Churchill work — say, Serious Money. Yet the company, in its first collaboration with Berkeley Repertory Theatre (of which Taccone is artistic director), puts an audacious sheen on the arguably dated but certainly ingenious work.

The idea behind Cloud Nine is that even as we try to chart new and more equitable social, economic, racial, and sexual territory, we’re influenced by a patriarchal, imperialist history that dates back to just closing your eyes and thinking of England while going about your procreative business. Not that the marauding Victorians of Churchill’s act one aren’t a lusty lot. Clive’s head, when it isn’t pontificating disapprovingly about " dark female lust, " is up the skirt of neighbor widow Mrs. Saunders. Wife Betty (played by a man) ping-pongs between spousal duty and attraction to family friend and macho explorer Harry Bagley while quite ignoring the plaintive lesbian advances of her children’s governess. And Bagley, a big-hatted ode to polymorphous perversity, tries to bag everything from Betty to the black butler (played by a white actor) to Edward, the sailor-suited son of the household (played by a woman).

By the time we get to the London of 1980, the sexuality that capered so rambunctiously in the closet of act one has come out. Edward is a gay gardener who, having been left by his surly long-time love, embraces his own femininity in the person of his sister, Victoria; he even becomes confused enough to wonder whether he’s a lesbian. Victoria (played by a rag doll in act one) is torn between her accommodating if angry husband, Martin, and Lin, a lesbian divorcée she meets at the park where son Tommy plays with Lin’s daughter Cathy (played by six-foot Timothy Crowe in pigtails and Ritalin overdrive). Meanwhile, Betty, having ditched her ringlets, her corset, and Clive, brings the play to its tender, triumphant conclusion with her simultaneous discovery of masturbation and embrace of her once-abnegated act-one self.

At Trinity, Cloud Nine is in excellent hands, Taccone’s staging being as precise as it is broad and freewheeling. West Coast and Broadway designer Loy Arcenas’s set offers both a dubious Big Brother of a Queen Victoria eyeing the outposts of Empire and, in its pivoting panels, a clever variation on the multiple slamming doors of farce. And in act one, lighting designer James Vermeulen deftly suggests the play of jungle fronds.

The performances, too, are first-rate, though Crowe’s hyperactive Cathy is a bit over the top and Fred Sullivan Jr.’s Bagley is a sort of safari version of his Captain Hook. Berkeley Rep import Danny Scheie is not only almost comely but touchingly, hilariously female as the Betty of act one. And Cynthia Strickland, aptly Lady Bracknell–esque as the Victorian mother-in-law, imbues the nervously liberated Betty of the second act with a healthy mix of self-discovery and skepticism. Sullivan is excellent as the trying-to-be-tolerant husband of act two; so is Crowe as lockstep bwana Clive. And Angela Brazil, as the young Edward, is a standout, almost airborne in her childish energy, yet heartbreakingly indicative of what it’s like to be trussed into a straitjacket of gender.