Despite its title, Jose Rivera’s time-warping stage drama “Cloud Tectonics” — now being staged by The New Theatre Project —isn’t really about weather; but a rainstorm does set the story in motion.

In the play, an LAX baggage handler, Anibal, is driving home through a flood when he picks up a pregnant hitchhiker, Celestina, and takes her to his home. The 20-something woman claims to be in her 50s; but that’s only the start of the play’s time rollercoaster, wherein Celestina is pregnant for two years, in labor for several months, and the object of Anibal’s brother’s desire over the course of two years — a stretch that passes in one night for Celestina.

“(TNTP artistic director Keith Paul Medelis) discovered the script,” said director Ben Stange. “But we both knew of Jose Rivera’s work previously, through ‘Marisol.’ … (‘Cloud’) was published in a collection of his plays, and we both read it and liked it, so we decided to do this one, since it’s not done as much as ‘Marisol.’”

Rivera, from a young age, was influenced by the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and Marquez eventually became Rivera’s mentor at the Sundance Institute. Rivera won an Obie Award for “Marisol,” which premiered in 1992 and told the story of a homeless woman who learns, from a guardian angel, that there’s a war being waged in heaven; and more recently, the Puerto Rican-American writer earned an Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which focused on a motorcycle trek that put young Che Guevara on his life’s path.

“Cloud,” meanwhile, premiered at the Humana Festival in 1995, earning critical praise.

TNTP’s production will happen in an unconventional theater space: Pot & Box, a garden store that also housed TNTP’s inaugural show, “The Spring Awakening Project.”

“For this play, we don’t have the luxury, we don’t have the space to do the show in-the-round, like we did with our previous production,” said Stange. “Instead, we’ll be using a kind of modified thrust, which makes things a little different. … We’re still feeling out the space, where we’ll try one configuration this time, and if that doesn’t work, we try something else.”

Jamie Weeder, who does a lot of work with Ann Arbor’s Blackbird Theatre, and Samer Ajluni and Frank Gutierrez, who have both worked with Detroit Repertory Theatre, make up the show’s cast.

And while the play’s poetic language and magical realism elements were part of the appeal for Stange, “Cloud”’s ideas were the biggest draw.

“In general, thinking about love in relation to the passage of time is an interesting concept,” said Stange. “It’s explored a lot, but usually not in such literal terms. In this play, time literally stops for them. They experience a night while the world around them experiences two years. It’s like taking Einstein’s ideas about relativity and applying them to love, where, when you're with someone you love, hours can feel like a minute. But then a minute can feel like an hour when your hand on a hot stove, too. Reality shifts to accommodate those feelings.”

Jenn McKee is the entertainment digital journalist for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at jennmckee@annarbor.com or 734-623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.