{"title":"Jose Rivera","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"cloud-tectonics-paperback","title":"Cloud Tectonics - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eDuring a record-breaking Los Angeles deluge, a man gives shelter to a beautiful, pregnant hitch-hiker who is searching for the father of her child. \"... CLOUD TECTONICS, José Rivera's often enchanting new play ... Rivera has successfully mixed two styles in which he previously dabbled, realism and magic 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.\" -Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Times \"The operative phrase for José Rivera's work is 'magic realism, ' which doesn't mean much until you've been put under the spell of his brief and lovely play, CLOUD TECTONICS. It's a love story, an old boy-meets-girl story, but ... it's also a story of theatrical enchantment, in which the ordinary is suddenly transformed into the miraculous. On a fantastically rainy night in Los Angeles, the city of Angels, a plain Joe named Anibal de la Luna picks up and brings home with him a poor, bedraggled woman hitchhiker who calls herself Celestina del Sol. She is fifty-four years old, she says, and she has been pregnant two years. She is indeed a rare and heavenly creature, a mystic wanderer with no sense of time and an infinite capacity to love. Alone in his little house, sealed off from the wails of the decaying city outside, De la Luna and Del Sol come together, joining their bodies and their dreams.\" -Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51324147925215,"sku":"9780881451375","price":18.65,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/816AdZtrHL9780881451375.webp?v=1788426130"},{"product_id":"giants-have-us-in-their-books-paperback","title":"Giants Have Us In Their Books - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis collection includes six short plays: FLOWERS, TAPE, A TIGER IN CENTRAL PARK, GAS, THE CROOKED CROSS, and THE WINGED MAN. The genesis of these fairy tales for adults was Mr. Rivera's daughter who asked where fairy tales came from and was told that people made them up and put them in books. ''Oh, '' she replied, ''then giants have us in their books.'' The plays that followed were written ''as if we were the subject of stories told by giants.\" FLOWERS: Lulu's acne must have some cosmic meaning, perhaps punishment for her vanity, but when the acne morphs into hibiscus flowers, she believes she is cursed. Her little brother, Beto, however, sees an \"unearthly beauty\" in the flowers. TAPE: If we suspected everything we said was being recorded, would we act differently? A TIGER IN CENTRAL PARK: A runaway tiger renders the island of Manhattan impotent. GAS: A man goes to a gas station to fill up his tank. The Gulf War has just started, and the man's brother is fighting in it. The gas comes out red. THE CROOKED CROSS: A high-school girl dons swastika earrings, given to her by her boyfriend, and finds that her life soon turns into a nightmare. THE WINGED MAN: A young girl bears the child of a fabled flying man. \"José Rivera's GIANTS HAVE US IN THEIR BOOKS, is subtitled 'Six Children's Plays for Adults.' The genesis of the plays, he explains in a program note, was his four-year-old daughter's observation that, if we have giants in our fairy tales, they must have us in theirs. Rivera wrote the plays, he says, 'as if we were the subject of fairy tales told by giants.' It's an apt notion. The six short plays in GIANTS have all the beautiful simplicity of fairy tales ... Rivera's prose has become more concentrated and spare, more pregnant with metaphor and poetry. The profuse and sometimes self-consciously fantastical stew of magic realism - which, like his mentor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rivera insists is just another form of everyday reality - has been condensed so that each image carries greater weight. The six short fables in GIANTS add up to two hours of compelling, entertaining and provocative theater.\" -Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51324149268703,"sku":"9780881455946","price":22.97,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/MZfmKQ5XzO9780881455946.webp?v=1788426137"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/jose-rivera.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}