Love so strong it freezes time, transforming yesterday, today and tomorrow into .... endless now.
If you're possessed of a romantic's soul, that can stop your heart in mid-beat. And it's the theme that courses through the veins of Cloud Tectonics, a lyrical, ethereal work of stagecraft by a playwright heralded for his knack for "magical realism." That would be Jose Rivera, who also penned the screenplay for the critically lauded The Motorcycle Diaries. At the cozy Studio Open, tucked just off Industrial Road, the Cockroach Theatre troupers ladle the love onto Rivera's enchanting, time-tripping tale.
It begins reasonably enough when, during a torrential rainstorm in the City of Angels, airport baggage handler Anibal de la Luna (John A. Lorenz) innocently picks up pregnant Celestina Del Sol (Monica Moreno). Alone, with nowhere to go, she's a young, pretty motormouth—perpetually hungry, sex ever on her mind—and her incessant chatter suggests a neurosis that both amuses and confuses Anibal, who gives her shelter at his apartment.
Seems headed toward typical boy-meets-girl, until the twentysomething-looking Celestina offhandedly mentions that she's 54, and has been pregnant for two years. Is she a garden-variety fruit loop or something much more profound? With that plot swerve, Rivera smashes through the rules of time and narrative convention, launching his characters and us toward a larger realm of reality overtaken by fantasy, in service of spirituality. The result is at once sweet and immensely affecting.
As Anibal and Celestina begin a romantic rendezvous, they are interrupted by Anibal's boisterous brother, Nelson (John Sastre), clad in Army fatigues and stopping by on his way to military training in Death Valley. Gung-ho Nelson is immediately smitten with Celestina, and with his brother's approval, promises to wed her when he returns. Nelson leaves, but is back 20 minutes later—a broken, bitter man after serving two years in Bosnia. And Celestina slips away.
What is happening? How? Why? Most vexing of all: when? Or is there a "when" at all in the orbit of Celestina?
Thanks to director Will Adamson's measured style and unerring sense of the material's delicate seesaw between intellectualizing and philosophizing, plus the cast's nuanced performances, we want those answers.
Rivera also threads hip humor throughout the dialogue, as when Anibal explains to Nelson that Celestina "looks like she's 25, but she says she's 54." Says Nelson: "That's f--king LA, bro." That helps ground Cloud Tectonics in the here-and-now, making the leap to the where-the-hell-are-we? that much more intriguing.
Rivera's piece embraces the idea that love transcends all things linear, too powerful and pervasive to be constrained by humankind's finite constructs—like time. And though his impassioned language gets a bit overcooked ("What is time?" Celestina asks. "What does it sound like? Does it taste like steak? Can you f--k it?"), the playwright achieves a remarkable synchronicity between the real and the surreal.
By the climactic scene, when a still young, beautiful Celestina reunites with the now-elderly Anibal, it's an a-ha! moment suggesting a soul-stirring possibility, as if cosmic tumblers have suddenly clicked into place like some otherworldly Rubik's cube.
Making her Las Vegas stage debut, Moreno walks a tightrope from which other actresses might fall. It would be easy to bury Celestina's mystical essence beneath her ditsy veneer, but Moreno projects not only lovability, but an ethereal glow in which the entire play is wrapped. Lorenz is equally impressive as Anibal, revealing the emotional layers of an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances, and Sastre's Nelson is a fierce force, riveting in both his affection and later, his anger.
Scott Fadale's white cloth-draped set and Dustin Burns' soft blue-red lighting scheme lend the production the aura of the earthbound, but touched by a hint of the heavens.
"I finally understood that I had taken a miracle into my house that night," says the elderly Anibal. "And what better way to respond to a miracle than to fall in love with it?"
Cloud Tectonics brings sunshine to the soul.