Cloud Tectonics
Jose Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics, a magical-realist romance, is set in this apocalyptic LA of the mind, with its long nights of speeding cars, gunshots, and screaming sirens. But in this beautiful, moving play Rivera is after something more resonant than yet another glib commentary on America in the last decade of the last century of the second millennium AD: he uses the psychically charged world of LA as a lens through which he can examine the deeper workings of the soul.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Cloud Tectonics Rivera shows more faith in his audience–and in his own ability as a storyteller. Though this work too is thickly encrusted with symbols, it’s also moving at its most basic level: man meets pregnant woman, man kisses pregnant woman, man loses pregnant woman…etc. Cloud Tectonics can also be read as a meditation on erotic power–when Celestina and Anibal are together, time literally stops–and as a tale of the spiritual journey that begins for Anibal with Celestina’s entrance into his life.
