To Surrealism, With Love
As I began reflecting on Out of Line Productions' fine revival of Jose Rivera's Cloud Tectonics, the thunder and lightning outside seemed bracing, dark, menacing. Then, with equal rapidity, the ominous clouds lifted from the sky. For a moment in time, it felt like the Los Angeles "storm of the century" that appears to crest as the play begins. Certainly director James Phillip Gates' spare use of lighting and driving-rain sound cues made it seem like a storm to remember.
Driving in the weather, Aníbal (Luis Vega), wearing a nearly blank expression and an American Airlines ground crew uniform, sees pregnant Celestina (Frederique Nahmani) trying to hitch a ride. While at first awestruck by the rain, Aníbal is quickly awestruck by Celestina-she carries a palpable air of mystery. He learns but a few things about her: The last ride she hitched (with a trucker) ended with her screaming, and she appears to have hitched to L.A. from Long Island-but not a lot more. Still, no self-respecting man would let a pregnant woman be shelterless in a storm so he brings her back to his apartment.
And it's there that Rivera's intense and surrealistic theatrical landscape somehow coheres even as time stops-or at least becomes thoroughly jumbled-for the rest of the play. Fresh from the military, for example, arrives Aníbal's younger brother, Nelson (Julio Rivera), but then Nelson must leave, although not before meeting Celestina, falling for her, caressing her unborn child and vowing to return for her after his discharge two years hence. Before the one-act is over-before 15 minutes is over-Nelson returns, shell-shocked by the Bosnian war, furious at Aníbal for refusing his letters, saddled with a violent streak and scarcely able to fulfill his pledge to her.
Aníbal, too, has fallen for Celestina: he's almost literally bewitched by her charms, not to mention her claim that she's been pregnant for two years and is 54 years old. "Who are you, Celestina?" Aníbal finally asks. Her reply, in part: "What bells, Aníbal, what vibrating string played by what virtuoso accompanies the passage of 'time'? Is 'time' blue? Does it taste like steak? Can you fuck it? Or is it just the invisible freight train that runs you over every single day?breaking you into smaller and smaller pieces??"
Having been influenced by Gabriel Garcia Márquez (among others), Rivera explains only cursorily how Celestina caused all the clocks and watches in Aníbal's home to stop. Yet instead of boosting or burying the playwright's time-smudging atmosphere, Gates' production, while uneven (the pacing could be picked up), embraces it. Smart choice.
The director also elicits a performance from Vega that grows on you, ironically, as time passes-how the actor handles several gorgeously written monologues later in the play justifies his choice, earlier on, to willfully downplay certain scenes. As Nelson, Rivera's transition from cocksure ebullience into wide-eyed emptiness impresses.
Celestina's full name is the heavenly Celestina Del Sol. And, like her character, Nahmani is appropriately enigmatic-it would be foolish, anyway, to apply the principles of realism to the playwright's time-space miasma. But Nahmani does more, creating an ephemeral, tilt-a-whirl performance that anchors the bizarreness. She's an inch of crystal-clear sky in a story catapulted out of the timelessness of pure imagination.