‘Cloud Tectonics,’ at Seattle’s Audio Theatre, loses its link to time

‘Cloud Tectonics,’ at Seattle’s Audio Theatre, loses its link to time

Theater overview

Time can be a wild notion when you assume about it way too considerably. We know it exists, we progress via it every day. We’ve constructed all of these text to explain it: days, months, many years. But how we basically encounter time can differ from person to individual and even from year to 12 months. Four years when you’re in large school can truly feel like an eternity, and then yrs afterwards you can search back again and come to feel like it flew by. Even appreciate, as demonstrated by author José Rivera in his perform “Cloud Tectonics,” can warp our practical experience of time.

“Cloud Tectonics,” presented in Seattle by Sound Theatre Business and community-based theater group Earthseed by means of Oct. 15, follows a evening, or probably two years, in the lives of Celestina and Anibal inside of Anibal’s condominium. Through a exceptional downpour in Los Angeles, Anibal picks up a expecting, hitchhiking Celestina and features her a position to stay the night time, with the guarantee of helping her on her journey to come across the father of her unborn boy or girl. But Celestina is no common hitchhiker. Where ever she goes, time appears to quit. Her mother and father imagined she might be cursed. Her father explained to her she was born when he was 25, but as she details out to Anibal, she’s much also youthful to be a 54-12 months-outdated with a 79-yr-old father whom she just observed dead prior to recently running away from dwelling. And her being pregnant? Nicely, she’s been expecting for two several years and counting.

The globe Rivera and director Jéhan Òsanyìn make, by way of the use of magical realism that delivers surrealistic factors into a planet that could simply be referred to as our personal, toys with our relationship to time. As shortly as Celestina enters Anibal’s apartment, his view stops and the electronic clock projected on the back wall blinks “12:00.” From there, “Cloud Tectonics” alternates involving diving into how really like can seem to be to prevent time and the complete horror and panic that can accompany the realization that time is all way too quickly passing you by.

To emphasize the former level, Òsanyìn highlights critical times of physical intimacy in Celestina and Anibal’s really like story. The air is tinged with the mystical as actors transfer virtually in gradual motion when Celestina (played listed here by Jay Woods) and Anibal (Myles Romo) initial contact arms. And later on, as Anibal rubs Celestina’s toes, lighting designer Adem Hayyu pulls concentration to them, dimming the relaxation of the stage as if the world close to them is slipping away. Woods and Romo wonderfully engage in these easy times of relationship as we look at Celestina and Anibal drop in really like in true time.

That is then contrasted with times like Anibal commencing to spiral when he realizes that he’s beginning to overlook the activities that introduced the two of them together, activities that supposedly could not have occurred far more than a handful of hours previously. Though that is very little as opposed to the ache seasoned by Nelson, Anibal’s younger brother performed by Jacob Alcazar. Alcazar shifts from humorous bravado attempting to woo Celestina to betrayed anger following he leaves the condominium only to return minutes later with two years’ truly worth of letters returned to sender and innumerable skipped cellular phone phone calls. More than those number of minutes of us seeing Anibal and Celestina slide in really like, the planet ongoing to fly by exterior of the condominium, major to decades that Anibal and Nelson will never ever get back

At its very best, this engage in and these performances deftly investigate these highs and lows. But then there are some practically inexplicable moments that left me scratching my head — times that seem to disconnect from what Rivera experienced prepared. For occasion, when Nelson very first arrives at Anibal’s condominium, he provides with him some beer that Anibal proceeds to set into his refrigerator. Mere moments later, Nelson asks Anibal if he has any beer, which, of system he does Nelson just gave him some. There’s a planet exactly where you can encourage me that this was intentional, to spotlight just how speedily persons can forget about factors in the presence of the time-altering Celestina, along the same strains as Anibal’s previously panicked moment. But not like other times of forgetting in the display that are acknowledged possibly as a result of dialogue or motion (like Anibal’s stress), there’s absolutely nothing to guidance a lapse from Nelson that transpires faster than any other moment in the exhibit. So even if intentional, it winds up experience much more indicative of the larger problem in just this creation.

Several scenarios like this are sprinkled during, where by the link to the textual content at hand appears to be to loosen. Rivera’s terms are stunning and vivid, like when Celestina is in discomfort and she describes it as feeling her little one tapping her spine with their fingers. But at occasions, this production seems to stumble more than them, resulting in the actors dropping the link with every single other that helps make this love story and magical exploration glow.

I’m admittedly a sucker for reveals that make me think, even if they are not perfect in their execution. Rivera’s participate in considers the constrained provide source that is time and asks us to ponder just how a great deal of our existence we tether to this principle. It gives us a story and then asks us to search inward and analyze its application to our daily lives. And definitely, that is what theater ought to do.

“Cloud Tectonics”

By José Rivera. Through Oct. 15 (Spanish captioning obtainable Oct. 1, 6 and 15) 12th Avenue Arts, 1620 12th Ave., Seattle masks and evidence of vaccination required $5-$75 soundtheatrecompany.org