Playwright: Jose Rivera
Pub Info: Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., 1997.
"I wonder if love sometimes does that to you. It alters the physics around you in some way:
changing the speed of light and the shape of space and how you experience time." (44)
Is Cloud Tectonics a love story? Maybe. I suppose. They tell me it is, on the back cover and in performance reviews and, even, in the long monologues throughout. The "love of a lifetime," the leading characters say, the idea that such a love makes you so different from how you were before that even something as elemental and innate as your concept of time is altered. I get that. But is this really a love story, or is it a warning?
"What's life? A fucking blink." (35)
I like going to the theater, but the special thing about reading plays instead of watching them is that I get to be the director, the actors, the stage hands, and the audience. The only authority that gets to affect how I interpret it is the playwright himself. In the case of Cloud Tectonics, that playwright is Jose Rivera the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Motorcycle Diaries, and, thankfully, he provides enough detailed, demanding stage directions that I could watch this whole production play out in my head. His words drip with poetry and purpose, grit and reality, drawn-out metaphors and very heavy-handed symbolism. If he ever took a class on how to make his audience cringe, scoff, sigh, smile all at the same time, he passed it with flying colors.
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| Staging of Cloud Tectonics; click for photo source. |
His leading characters are Celestina del Sol and Anibal de le Luna -- I don't speak Spanish, but geez, I get that much -- and their setting is simple: a small house in LA, in "the present," during the storm of the century. Anibal finds Celestina, a beautiful young woman who is "very pregnant" and offers her a ride. Realizing she and her child have no where to go, he hesitantly but nobly offers her a warm place to sleep in his house for the night.
It's not long before he's pretty sure she's absolutely insane.
Celestina tells him that, by all accounts, she's been pregnant with her baby for two whole years, and though she could pass for early twenties, she's at least fifty-four. When she walks into his house, the clocks stop, the TV goes out, and they're cut off from the screaming sirens and raging storm outside. Isolated, adrift, disconnected from the world around them and, it turns out, from the passage of time.
"Papi wanted me to count numbers, count numbers, over and over; he said it would teach me
about the nature of 'time,' and I tried and tried, I really did, but I didn't learn anything." (18)
For Celestina, there is no such thing as minutes, hours, days, years as we know them. To her, a lifetime could pass in a moment, and a moment feels like days. That, from the outset, makes this play worthwhile for me, because it is so frustratingly fascinating to contemplate a life where time plays no part. Like Anibal's brother Nelson, an enlisted serviceman who appears briefly on stage, we are all of us trapped in the when of life--when we will arrive, when we will leave, when we will do, be, act, go, change. To consider no schedules, no aging or growing up, no distinction between then and now, is interesting and, by the end of the play, a little exhausting, too.
Nelson de la Luna alone breaks the isolation of Celestina and Anibal during the play, and only one who's still trapped in a world dictated by time; he's got only two hours to visit his brothers after years apart. He comes in with a flurry of sirens and thuderclaps from outside, and his reunion with his brother plays out the way most reunions do: how long has it been?; going so soon?; when will you be back? Nelson, blatantly, represents the "normal" progression, time as we know it outside of Celestina's world.
The main action of the play spans, perhaps, an hour of Anibal's day. He and Celestina talk, eat, almost-but-not-really have sex, and then there's Nelson again, knocking on the door and bringing the sound of sirens with him. "It's only been a few minutes," Anibal tells him, but in that short time he spent alone with Celestina, two years have actually passed.
"Trying
to understand such a life, and why love matters to it, why a god would
need to be loved too,
was like trying to understand the anatomy of the
wind or the architecture of silence or cloud tectonics.
(He laughs)
Yeah. What better way to respond to a miracle than to fall in love with
it?" (70)
So where, exactly, does the love-and-romance part start? I honestly don't know. One minute we're ruminating on time, discussing Anibal's life story on two coasts, trying to figure out Celestina's sad, sentimental, and creepily child-like sexual fantasies, and the next, we're all of a sudden thrust into a grand metaphor of what love does to you. I like the grand metaphor, really. I get it, totally. But where does it come from? Why are we all of a sudden supposed to believe we just witnessed the "love of a lifetime?" By all accounts, they just cuddled on a bed suspended over the stage and woke up two years later.
But in order to make this play work, we've got to accept that they fall in love, even though Anibal's got a girl named Debbie that he loved from afar for five years and finally won over, even though Celestina is crazy (in real life he'd have had her committed, not kissed her feet), even though Celestina is "very pregnant" and currently on a mission to find the baby's father, who may or may not have raped her two years ago, when the baby was conceived. But, alright, sure, they're in love. And love stops time and makes you forget yourself and paints the whole world as one long, glittering, beautiful moment that will stretch on forever and ever if only you'd let it. Fade to black.
In my opinion, though, that's not the message that makes this play powerful.
"It was so long ago and so much has happened since then, so much life, so much dying, so
many changes, it just gets buried under all the time between now and then, you know?" (67)
The most touching part, to me, was the way the play toys with a concept of memory, both as a product of time-that-has-passed and as a reflection of what makes us whole. Anibal is constantly forgetting; he forgets how to speak Spanish, the names of people he used to know and when exactly he knew them, how certain circumstances of his life came to be the way they are. It speaks of how easily life--the important things, the little things that shape us, the moments that were so valuable--gets swept up and diluted as time marches forward, as if that passage of time blurs everything but the lingering essence of feelings we used to know.
I see in this play a distinct warning, or at least, an urging to ask yourself the question, With what do we chose to fill our "time?" And what kind of life would it be if the things we chose today are all we'll ever have? Do we love, even if it means two years of our lives could slip by without our knowing, if other relationships and obligations are neglected or forgotten for the sake of it, if we'd be haunted by it forever, even after it's gone? Maybe Rivera's telling us that that's what love is, the relinquishing of our whole lives for that one feeling, and even though the world is turning outside and time is passing, you're always going to trapped in that love, alive in love like you aren't alive anywhere else. Are you prepared for that?
I'm not sure why I decided to read this play last night. I was looking for an old yearbook on my bookshelf and it was wedged into a stack of old student literary magazines, slender and small with its corners all crinkled. I was just flipping through it, reminding myself what it was about, when I kept getting stuck on certain words and phrases so often I finally gave in and read the whole thing. Overall, I would say, those words and phrases are the sum of it's worth; the play itself is fueled by poetics but little story, and sadly, the characters are structured to be symbols and that's all they ever really amount to: pretty symbols for sad notions, bluntly staged and fleeting.
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