The Capitol Hill Arts Center opens its new season with Cloud Tectonics, a surreal romance about aLos Angeles baggage slinger and an odd, oversexed, and very pregnant hitchhiker. AnĂbal de la Luna is driving home from a late shift at LAX when he picks up young Celestina del Sol in a thunderstorm. She's wandering the country, looking for the father of her childâthat she's been mysteriously carrying for two yearsâand AnĂbal hesitantly agrees to let her spend the night at his house.
The more he talks to her, the stranger she gets. Celestina is in her 50s, her parents thought she was cursed, and the clocks in AnĂbal's house stop the moment she walks through the door. Time slows around Celestina, but AnĂbal doesn't realize that until his brother visits twice in the same nightâonce before shipping off to Bosnia, the other after returning as a broken veteran. Todd Licea and Jennifer Faulkner are enchanting as AnĂbal and Celestina, especially in their quieter momentsâwhen they silently eat quesadillas or he rubs her tired feet. Their strange (and eventually frustrated) courtship is steamy, but director AimĂ©e Bruneau keeps the atmosphere innocent and open, charming us into the play's fantasy.
JosĂ© Rivera's script is richly poeticâsometimes carelessly so. He creates a hermetic world where Celestina can credibly sigh dreamy metaphors, but it's hard to buy that AnĂbal's macho brother would really put his ear to her pregnant stomach and say: "It sounds like stars scraping across the sky." It is easier to believe in warped laws of physics than muddy charactersâmagical realism requires consistent inconsistency.
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Also featuring a woman carrying a magical child (hint: she's a pregnant virgin), A Very Special Money and Run Winter Season Holiday Special is... okay. The comic action serial about a backwoods Bonnie and Clyde is like the uncle who plays "Heart and Soul" with his feet every Thanksgivingâbrilliant the first time and tiresome the 12th. But the theater was filled with laughing devotees who clapped after every scene, so I suppose Run is still making money.
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There were more people in the audience than the cast for the WWI drama The Accrington Pals, which added to its charm. The story is sentimental but not sappy and the actors are hardworking but not particularly talentedâthe production has the threadbare feel of an actual wartime "amateur theatrical." Pals, by British playwright Peter Whelan, is about a volunteer battalion headed for France and the knot of wives and lovers they leave behind. You already know the boys' storyâlusty brothers in arms disillusioned by the ugliness of warfareâbut Pals belongs to the women. Fortunately, Whelan doesn't whitewash them into historical banality. The ladies of Accrington feud, scandalize each other with dirty jokes, take over the factory work, and have complicated relationships with one another and their boys in the trenches.
Jeremy Topping (Tom) and Eva Doak (May) have the most difficult and interesting relationship. Ten years older than Tom and something of a prude, May is ashamed of their mutual attraction. She resists her feelings and his advances, leaving them to sort out their true feelings in letters to and from the battlefield. Occasionally charming, The Accrington Pals is more interesting historically than artisticallyâunless you're a veteran or a military wife.
brendan@thestranger.com