Even before a word is said in playwright José Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics, the black box theater at the Latino Cultural Center is set for a clash between the real and the dreamlike.
A platform stage holding the familiar makings of a humdrum apartment — fold-out couch, cramped kitchen, loft bed — sits at a skewed angle. Two sections of seats meet at one of the corners. When Alyssa Carrasco and Omar Padilla enter from behind the audience, they stop at that intersection, surrounded by darkness, to have their first conversation.
It’s the “storm of the century” in Los Angeles, and Carrasco’s pregnant hitchhiker is outside in the downpour. As soon as Padilla’s LAX luggage handler picks her up, he begins to put the situation in perspective.
“New York kills its people one by one, a gun here, a knife there,” Padilla says. “But this! The LA thing? We’re talking mass destruction. One freak flood at the wrong time of year and hundreds die. The atmosphere sags from its own toxic heaviness.”
”Why don’t you go back to New York?” Carrasco asks.
”Are you kidding?” he responds. “I love it here.”
Infused with that kind of ironic humor, accompanied by despair, melancholy and the uncanny, Teatro Dallas’ understated rendering of Rivera’s Twilight Zone-like script from 1995 is one of the best productions of the 2023-24 North Texas theater season.
Rivera’s storytelling is so sure-handed that not five minutes into Cloud Tectonics, you know you’re in the presence of something extraordinary. As a protégé of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the father of magical realism, the Puerto Rican-born, Long Island-raised playwright adheres to the idea that unexplainable things can happen in the most mundane circumstances, no metaphors necessary.
Director Sasha Maya Ada honors that belief with a light touch. Beyond the subtly ingenious staging, she relies on the actors’ grounded delivery of the lines. Carrasco and Padilla click not just with each other but also with Rivera’s words. He does sneak in a symbol or two, naming their characters Celestina del Sol and Anibal de la Luna.
Later, when Anibal’s brother Nelson (played by Francisco Grifaldo) stops by on the way to his military outpost, he adds to both the real and surreal aspects of the play.
Celestina is searching for the father of her baby. She isn’t certain when she’s due, the suspension of time being the play’s central conceit. Around her, clocks and watches don’t work. The phone goes dead. “Time and I don’t hang out together,” she says.
After Anibal brings Celestina to his apartment, she comes on to him. Despite having a girlfriend, he flirts back. Yet the sexual tension between them has a kind of innocence to it. So does the humor, including a common Spanish expletive Anibal constantly uses to express surprise. They talk to each other about their everyday lives.
After Nelson arrives, the plot speeds up, the sci-fi aspects creep to the forefront and one is left to wonder if Cloud Tectonics is about to go off the rails. But no worries. As the play fast-forwards to the future, Rivera is setting up a bittersweet yet idealistic ending atop the loft. The touching poetry of the moment is contained in small silences and Gerry Guerrero’s moody lighting design.
It’s a very LA story, with references to the ever-present threat of earthquakes and the Hollywood myth-making machinery, which Rivera is familiar with as a formerly LA-based screenwriter.
But Cloud Tectonics is not a fantasy. Real life is strange enough.
Details
Cloud Tectonics runs through June 1 at the Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St., Dallas. $25. teatrodallas.org.
