Cloud Tectonics

CRITICS CHOICE

It’s not easy to strike a balance between the two seemingly irreconcilable elements of Jose Rivera’s 1995 magic realist play, set in LA: his recognizable, realistic characters and their extraordinary situation, as a callow young man takes in a pregnant woman seemingly doomed to carry her child for years. But in Juan Castaneda’s simple, unaffected, yet perceptive staging, the Halcyon Theatre folks neither heighten the surrealism of the play’s time warps nor overplay the characters’ psychology. Aimee Bravo as the woman excels at speaking Rivera’s poetic dialogue without forcing it, and she’s adept at playing both the naturalistic and archetypal aspects of her character—she’s at once an abandoned, wounded pregnant woman and an earth mother who could redeem her lover if only he weren’t so blind. Playing the young man, Miguel A. Morales subtly follows the woman’s emotional lead, as the script demands. --Jack Helbig; January 24, 2008








Puerto Rican-American playwright Jose Rivera studied under Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute, and this Twilight Zone-like piece is shot through with classic magic realism. LAX baggage handler Anibal picks up a mystery hitchhiker in the middle of a biblical-scale downpour, taking the hugely pregnant MILF-to-be in when she confesses that she’s got nowhere to stay. Romance flowers, despite her ostensible hunt for the deadbeat daddy, Anibal’s offstage girlfriend, and a lot of crazy talk; though Celestina looks twentysomething, she claims she’s 54, and what’s more, has been with child for 24 months. But after what seems like one night of passion Anibal finds that years have passed in the outside world; Celestina, in fact, is quasi-immortal, and time itself barely passes around her.

It’s an intriguing conceit, but that’s about all there is to it, and it’s about all the show’s intermissionless hour forty-five has under the hood. There’s a nicely spellbound air to things—appropriate given the Calypso-episode overtones—and intermittent flashes of starstruck poetry, but Rivera’s idea, ironically, is for the most part static, perpetually returning to a portentous state of rest. Stuck with doing a lot of nothing onstage, the actors acquit themselves well; Bravo’s innocently eroticized portrayal of Celestina is especially natural and direct. Castaneda teases out a few soaring moments, particularly in the closing scene, and a steady string of inventive, intricate sound/set/lighting interactions concretely (if also a little haltingly) evoke the thoroughgoing dreaminess. But the mythic inexplicability of the supernatural elements eventually goes from wondrous to numbing, as the basic idea just gets reiterated more or less unchanged. — Brian Nemtusak; January 17, 2008