Rivera’s ‘Cloud Tectonics’ @ Teatro Dallas
Photos and graphic art courtesy of Teatro Dallas
—Teresa Marrero
Cloud Tectonics by Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera closes out the 2023-2024 regular theater season for Teatro Dallas. Presented in the Latino Cultural Center’s intimate black-box space, this play made me question, as a theater critic, just who I’m writing for. More on that later.
First the facts….
Directed by Sasha Maya Ada, with set design by Kennedy Smith, the play takes us into the timeless world of Celestina del Sol (Alyssa Carrasco), an anomaly of the natural world who seems to exist outside of time. While hitchhiking one torrentially rainy night in Los Angeles, California (remember, “it never rains in Southern California”—take it from me, I grew up there), the kind-hearted LAX baggage operator Aníbal de la Luna (Omar Padilla) picks up this lovely and very pregnant woman.
There is an obvious switching of the male-female symbolism; Rivera assigns the sun/Sol persona to Celestina, and the moon/Luna role to Aníbal.
He brings her home and all the clocks stop.
Celestina´s unusual story begins to unravel: believed to be cursed by her parents, she grows up alone in her room where her imagination is her only friend…until…one of her father´s workers, Rodrigo Cruz, sneaks into her bedroom and has his way with her. Pregnant, she runs away from home, looking for Rodrigo, hitchhiking to every corner of the country.
Celestina does not know her age, nor how long she´s been pregnant. (It´s been at least two years by the end of the play.) She knows nothing of time, and therefore lives in the forever present.
She weaves her stories around Anibal´s heart. Watch out for the foot rubs that she demands go higher and higher…until Anibal´s brother Nelson (Francisco Grifaldo), on leave from the army, unexpectedly pops in to visit.
He instantly falls in love with Celestina, and pronounces himself the father of this unborn son. He must go back to camp, but asks her to wait for him to return in two years.
There are fractures in the time frame between the internal world of the apartment and the external world of…everything else. Rivera is known for magical realism—a rather meaningless and well-trodden label by now—though director Ada writes in the program that she prefers to call it ¨mad realism…and organic absurdity.¨
This is a story for adults (language and sexual situations) willing to take a leap into non-linear time structures—though Cloud Tectonics is an accessible play; it makes every effort to help the audience by tying up loose ends.
Now to my question: For whom do I write, then, as a critic?
It would be naïve to ignore that many of us seasoned critics have at least 25 or more years of watching plays under our belts, all held within our compounded memories.
For this performance, I had the privilege of going with two friends from my tango world, who are not steeped in theatrical traditions, and with one friend who is an even more seasoned theater expert than me.
My new theater goer friends loved the play, and I was happy and relieved that they did. After all, there was lots of language and sexual innuendo….
They had all sorts of insightful comments, mainly about the play’s philosophical perspective on time, and that all we truly have is the eternal now. They commented on the ingenious ways the vestiges of time were introduced at the end through Aníbal´s state.
They also loved the actors’ performances. We agreed on this. Padilla leads the way in passing a yin/yang energy back and forth with Carrasco’s Celestina. Grifaldo makes a strong yet brief entry. The set design allows the audience to be very close, which makes the emotional impact stronger.
Pretty good insights for relatively new audience members.
With my theater-expert friend, I had an entirely different conversation: the play had several false endings… and heavens, were the last 10 minutes necessary? Too many explanations at the end for us (but all right with my newbie friends).
But the use of the pregnant woman’s body as an object of fetishistic sexual desire by both brothers felt kinky and added nothing to the story….And why insert Nelson into the story in the first place? Rivera doesn’t develop the relationship between the brothers. Is Nelson only there to mark time, and/or to compete with his brother for the pregnant woman’s love?
The mid-’90s play includes a couple of pejorative references to gayness and being gay. And heavens, too much of the word coño (Spanish for cunt)—and this from a character who claims he doesn´t speak Spanish.
¡Por dios!
For me, those things were fingernails on the blackboard, but they may not bother others. And they are issues with the script, not with the direction or the performances. But with other more interesting plays by Rivera, among them his 1993 Obie-winning Marisol, why choose this one?
You, the reader/potential-audience member, ultimately select which of these perspectives to embrace—and you’re free, certainly, to generate your own! The experience of Cloud Tectonics is definitely worth the very reasonable price of admission.
Teresa Marrero is Professor of Latin American and Latinx Theater, literatures and cultures at the University of North Texas. She reviews dance & theater for Onstage NTX.
WHEN: May 18-June 1, 2024
WHERE: Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak Street, Dallas
WEB: teatrodallas.org
