Cloud Tectonics by Jose Rivera

I feel like there was a fad in the '90s for plays that were weird for the sake of being weird, and this one falls perfectly into that category. Somehow, a mysterious pregnant woman slows time to a crawl. It is her curse and she therefore has no understanding of time the way that others do. A man picks her up on the side of the road in a horrible storm and brings her to his house. His estranged brother swings by and proclaims love of and devotion to this unknown woman. He will be stationed abroad for two years, but will come back for her after that, which turns out to be the same night because of her weird relationship to time. The brother sees that she is still pregnant, assumes it is a new pregnancy, assumes it is his brother's, and leaves again. The man goes after his brother, the woman goes after him, his house is freed from her time vortex. So, he ages, she doesn't, and they meet again when her child is a toddler and he is on his deathbed. Supposedly, the two fell in love in the two years/two hours they were together and she declares this in Spanish to him when they are both young and then in English when he is dying. Is it a romance? Not by my definition. The epigraphs would seem to suggest that this is about relativity, but it is like a less logical, less moving “Constellations.”