Theatrical Tectonics: The Slowdown Entertainment of a José Rivera Play

A couple of hours before watching José Rivera’s play Cloud Tectonics staged at the German State Theatre in Timișoara, Romania, I was chatting with the theatre’s head of dramaturgy and PR department, Andrea Wolfer. I asked her what’s the point of going to the theatre today, of putting in the time to get dressed and travel to the theatre building, where at home I have at my fingertips all the amazing movies, great TV series, and funny TikToks in the world. Andrea’s reply mentioned the benefits of a different experience of time that we have in the theatre, instilling a patience with our own being in the world. In the theatre field, we often mention the idea of sharing physical space as a benefit of live performance, but less so the idea of sharing time. I thought about the slow food movement in reaction to fast food culture, and made the joke that theatre people can brag about making slowdown entertainment amidst a culture of fast entertainment streaming at the click of a button. My talk with Andrea primed me to view Cloud Tectonics through the lens of slowdown entertainment, wondering about its peculiarities as a theatre show.

José Rivera’s play is thematically too, all about time. In Cloud Tectonics, a massively pregnant, gorgeous twenty-five-year-old woman, Celestina del Sol, is mercifully picked up from the side of the highway during a Biblical deluge by Aníbal de la Luna, a twenty-something Puerto Rican man driving home from his job as a baggage handler at the Los Angeles International Airport. Around Celestina, who thinks she may be fifty-four years old and two years pregnant, time stops. The one evening, night, and morning that Celestina spends with Aníbal in his apartment equals to two years in the outside world. We know this because Nelson, Aníbal’s younger, high-spirited brother, drops in for a visit that evening before being shipped to fight in the war in Bosnia (Cloud Tectonics premiered in 1995). He returns in the morning as a PTSD-ridden, broken shell of his former self. Of course, both brothers fall in love with Celestina, which, in machismo shorthand, is communicated via the respect they have for her body. They barely dare to kiss her or to caress her feet and belly consensually. Upon his return, Nelson flips out to see the same pregnant Celestina there, storms out of the twilight-zone apartment, and by the time Aníbal returns with him, Celestina is gone. In the last scene, Celestina returns too, having just stepped out to give birth. By then, though, Aníbal is a senile old man who doesn’t recognize her, but does ask her to “massage” his feet, which reveals Celestina’s indelible imprint on his person beyond human memory and the vicarious human experience of living in (separate) time. This allows the play to end on the bittersweet note of doomed lovers favored by Spanish and Latin American romance.

The conventional boy-meets-supernatural-girl plot influenced in style by the likes of Federico García Lorca and Gabriel García Márquez pleads to be read as a vehicle to reflect on how we construct our sense of who we are based on our memories and experiences in time, how we understand others, and how we form relationships when both self and others bend fluidly in time. The mythical, universal dimension behind a domestic story is signaled even in the characters’ names, del Sol and de la Luna, of the sun and moon. Rivera wants us to use the mystery of falling in love as a cue to make us think how much we know ourselves and others. To understand such things, the play tells us, is like trying to understand cloud tectonics, trying to grasp a solid, fixed structure of something that is perpetually shifting in motion and in the flux of time. By contrast, the theatre as an art form has clear formal structures, so using Rivera’s play to talk about theatre tectonics is a comparatively pragmatic endeavor.

Rivera is both a playwright and a screenwriter, and his Wikipedia page states his plan to adapt Cloud Tectonics to a movie bearing the name Celestina, a project that doesn’t seem to have materialized, judging from a quick internet search. Celestina’s time travel remains restricted to theatre buildings, although perhaps the play’s cinematic qualities of quick jumps in time appeal to theatre directors as staging challenges. László Bocsárdi, who directed the production at the German State Theatre, certainly seems to have enjoyed materializing in stage action the play’s slaloming through spacetime. My favorite directorial decision is having the characters age and the space morph before the audience, with the actors doing costume changes and applying the makeup on stage, while the stagehands (a group of four men in work overalls) matter-of-factly move the props around in full view. Exposing some of the mechanics of theatre tectonics and exacerbating the artificiality and overt theatricality grounded Rivera’s lofty themes into visible and sensorial stage information that instead of letting the audience drift into the thematized incomprehension about being, tethered them to explicit demonstrations of how the theatre represents change. Perhaps a film adaptation would be tempted to render the spacetime shifts more smoothly, with quick jump cuts back and forth. But exposing the clunkiness of navigating time humanizes Rivera’s play. Celestina might be supernaturally cruising in time, forever young, but the rest of us slog through.

The production’s stress on materiality gives opportunities for significant input to the set designer József Bartha and light designer Sándor Baumgartner. They both succeed in representing the domestic and urban spaces in familiar ways that are at the same time not realistic, fitting with Rivera’s science-fictionalized conventional love story. Aníbal’s modest apartment included the usual appliances, but each piece is of a different, bright color, from the bubblegum pink stove to the viridian green table and canary yellow cupboard. Ceiling-high backdrops of banal grey plastic sheets magically transform into a starry night sky due to backlighting sparkling through the previously invisible punctures. The rigged bed floated in this fairylike space to mark Celestina and Aníbal falling in love as they lay down to sleep together, like Tristan and Isolde, without impure thoughts (Catholicism leaves its mark). The theatre is laughably clunky in special effects until suddenly a moment unexpectedly unfolds that takes your breath away. Lighting is always key in producing this alchemic moment. All the stage props representing Aníbal’s apartment were on wheels for quick shifts (in time and action) and eventually rigged and lifted into the fly space to represent the passage of time before Celestina’s return to an octogenarian Aníbal in a completely different-looking apartment. The production did not fully exploit the set’s horizontal and vertical mobility. Just as I learned that the furniture could float, it quickly disappeared. More moments of temporal indeterminacy throughout the play could have been effectively served by floating furniture.

In the combination of bright, multicolored furniture and dull backdrops, Bartha understood that this play, despite its heavy, melancholic themes, also wants to be a comedy. The production as a whole, though, seems to have forgotten it. The actors do their best to land the jokes in the script, but the heavy use of smoke machines and the predominance of eerie sound design—water drops, menacing tick-tocks—creates a heavy and moody atmosphere that serves well the science-fiction aspect of the play, but not its romantic comedy part.

Cloud Tectonics’ biggest staging challenge, however, is not related to finding a good balance between realism and science fiction, philosophy and comedy, nor related to representing the bending spacetime. All of these are good challenges that give directors and designers ample opportunities for theatrical invention. By contrast, the actors playing Celestina and Nelson don’t have much to work with. As a character, Celestina is defined by a stereotypical, patriarchal idea of femininity thinly masked by the conceit of her supernaturalness. She is all (sex and food) appetite, exaggeratedly fecund but necessarily hot, motherly and matronly but not allowed to ever age, and of course, a bit crazy. Silvia Török playing Celestina must blabber on maniacally about her past and the mythical man who knocked her up, must declaim again and again philosophical inanities as befits her posited femaleness and otherworldliness (“Is time blue? Does it taste like steak? Can you eat it?”) and through it, somehow, stay cute and not at all annoying. Her character must fall in love but there’s nothing in the script to give an actress reason why she does so. She encourages both Nelson and Aníbal seemingly with the logic that it’s what a woman does: she lives to make men fall in love with her. For Rivera, women are more of a mystery than the quantum mechanics of spacetime. They are not even really human, in fact, but some mythical creatures employed as plot devices to drive the male character arc. Török cannot construct details and facets to the character and give her a believable emotional journey because Celestina literally doesn’t go anywhere, she’s stuck in the same moment. Nelson has a bit more meat on it as an acting role in the sense that the two years that pass between his two scenes on stage have to show markedly different versions of him. Harald Weisz as Nelson milks this before and after, and has the opportunity to demonstrate an acting range, but the character itself is so two-dimensional in its pre- vs post-trauma versions, that it feels more of a caricature both times. Marc Illich as Aníbal de la Luna rises to the occasion of the one interesting acting role in Cloud Tectonics, giving a compelling performance of the character’s multiple aspects, as young and old, as simple yet with depth, as faithful yet not quite, as in love but moving on—in short, a human complexity missing from iconic Celestina and plot instrumental Nelson. A fourth performer, Dana Borteanu, merely glides downstage left to right, right to left beautifully singing Spanish love songs.

As slowdown entertainment, Cloud Tectonics felt too slow. If time is experienced subjectively, we, theatre makers mustn’t forget that the public’s inner clocks are set to run rapidly in an age of fast entertainment, even when we’ve set to slow it down. When so much resonates with me online, I have less tolerance for meandering stories with unclear relevance for this spacetime. Even so, one thing fascinated me about the production. More so than the time traveling through multiple dimensions, I appreciated the movement through multiple languages. Rivera, a Puerto Rican playwright living in the U.S., wrote a play where the identity quest is significantly manifested on the inter-cultural plane, with characters, notably Aníbal, negotiating his sense of self in two languages. Originally written in English, Cloud Tectonics, contains substantial passages in Spanish. At the German State Theatre, the actors speak in German, while English and Romanian translations are projected as supertitles. For Cloud Tectonics, Bocsárdi kept the original Spanish, which was not included in the translated supertitles. On stage, actors interpreted Spanish-speaking Americans in German. During the play, I was glancing at both supertitles in Romanian and English, the two languages I’m fluent in, while understanding bits and pieces of the spoken German and Spanish. I experienced this play in four languages at the same time, and not at all as a Babel cacophony, but as a mesmerizing language composition that coursed along through harmonies and disjoints. This, to me, is a perfect example of slowdown entertainment’s potential to stretch the brain into curiosity for the unfamiliar.

This journalistic material has been realized through a grant Energie! Burse de Creație funded by the City of Timișoara, through the Center for Projects. The material does not necessarily represent the position of the Center for Projects and is not responsible for its content or the way in which it may be used.