ed in time around her present. Starting a new phase in her career in the mid-1970's, she began to look at history and place her plots in appropriate time frames to make her objective, within each play, more vivid. Paired with the Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock, Churchill "multiplied her ideas, intensified her energy, expanded the range of viewpoints she was able to encompass, presented fresh avenues for theatrical experiment, and helped her develop an integrated feminist-socialist critique of society" (Fitzsimmons 29). From this position she wrote many plays such as Vinegar Tom and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. During this time the Brechtian influences came out full force. She went, in this time, full scale from emulating him to pointing out bold differences between herself and the heavily influential force of Brecht. Her historical plays did not only show an overview of the set period but "subjected traditional versions of the historical phenomenon to critical revision" ( Kritzner 84). She also uses this movement of her career to empower her audiences to take an active role in the play by reclaiming their own history. The plays challenge not only the thoughts and practices of the past and of her present, but also that the reputations of history be "regarded as sealed records not amenable to change in the present. " (Kritzner 84). Where was she?Sex and GenderThe next move that Churchill made in her career was to attack the ideas of gender in her society. This is the area she was in while she wrote Cloud Nine. She discarded her previous focus of Brecht, but still took some of the fundamental teachings with her. In an introduction to the play, written by Churchill herself, she describes her thought process during the writing of the play. "Originally I thought it would all be set in the present like the second act; but the idea of colonialism as a parallel to sexual oppression, which I first came across in Genet, had be...
