THEATER REVIEW : Jose Rivera Weaves His Magical Spell in ‘Cloud Tectonics’

In a torrential rain of apocalyptic dimensions, a man picks up a hitchhiker in his car. She is drenched and hugely pregnant--two years pregnant. When he takes her home, all of the clocks in his apartment stop. In fact, time stops. Outside, the world changes dramatically. People age and go mad. But in that apartment, eternity blossoms. In other words, two people have fallen in love.

This is the world of “Cloud Tectonics,” Jose Rivera’s often enchanting new play, staged with real vigor and imagination by Tina Landau at La Jolla Playhouse. Rivera has successfully mixed two styles in which he previously dabbled, realism and magical realism, to produce a naturalistic play interlaced with symbols and magical occurrences. In doing so, he has found a voice to probe the mystery of the kind of love that stops your heart as surely as it does your sense of time and space. And he does it without goo.

Rivera sets the story in a disaster-prone Los Angeles, mostly in the Echo Park apartment of Anibal de la Luna (Luis Antonio Ramos), a baggage handler at LAX. The rainstorm is so bad that the airport has been closed, causing Anibal, an ex-New Yorker, to take pride in the scale of his adopted city’s devastations. “New York kills its people one at a time,” he notes, unimpressed. This sense of a world always on the brink of annihilation surrounds the blooming miracle inside of the apartment, set off by the presence of the pregnant woman, Celestina del Sol (Camilia Sanes).

Celestina does not really have a personality, although she does recite a short biography. She is more of a symbol--a woman who has spent her childhood in a little room, who gets impregnated in her one and only sexual encounter, and who is abandoned. She is a particular masculine vision of Love, or of Woman--hurt, in need of rescue, desirous, beautiful, fertile and ripe. Her inability to learn the rules of time demonstrates that she is timeless and also at least a little bit insane.

On leave from army training, Anibal’s brother Nelson (Javi Mulero) also falls in love with Celestina. Upon looking at her, he is instantly transformed from a sex-starved sexist into a lovesick soldier who longs to be the father of the child with the improbably long gestation period.

Landau brings absolute conviction to the world Rivera has painted, and she has instilled the sense of that world in her three appealing actors. Sanes may play a symbol, but she is also a delicate cross between a person who knows nothing of life and one who understands everything. As Anibal, Ramos gives a largely reactive performance, and he is surprising and funny while taking the puzzling journey from his ordinary world to the extraordinary one that Celestina brings to him. As the brother, Mulero makes a startling transformation as a man who, without love, must suffer all the harsh rules and ravages of time.

Set designer Riccardo Hernandez creates both the torrential world outside and the peaceful indoor glow of the apartment. Landau fluidly stages the scene in which the lovers, named for the sun and moon, encounter a celestial eternity. Celestina del Sol and Anibal de la Luna climb up a long ladder to a bed that hangs in the air, against a starry, starry sky. Also suspended in air is a hint of exquisite music (by Martin R. Desjardins), a note that hovers somewhere between sound and melody, a quivering expectation of beauty.

Rivera’s poetry pulses through the play, but he also grounds the language in earthy humor. There are overwritten patches that occasionally clog and clutter and just don’t sound right. Yet Rivera often cleanses the palette, so to speak, with the refreshing anti-poetry of the men. When Anibal learns that time has stopped in his apartment for two years, he wants to know who has been paying the light bill.

Once he meets Celestina, Anibal notes that last night, spent with another lover, seems like a million years ago. Love has that effect on time, of course. “Cloud Tectonics” is a meditation on the immortal days of our lives, days in which time stands still and we feel the grip of eternal mysteries. What better way to understand a mystery, Anibal later asks, than to fall in love with it?

At La Jolla, “Cloud Tectonics” invites us to do just that.

* “Cloud Tectonics,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m . ; Sun., 7 p.m. Ends July 16. $19-$34. (619) 550-1010, TDD/Voice (619) 550-1030. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Camilia Sanes: Celestina del Sol Luis Antonio Ramos: Anibal de la Luna Javi Mulero: Nelson de la Luna A La Jolla Playhouse production. By Jose Rivera. Directed by Tina Landau. Sets by Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Brandin Baron. Lights by Anne Militello. Sound By Mark Bennett. Stage manager Kristen Harris.