It would be silly to dismiss Hurricane Season simply because the production has no final curtain and the cast has to work through the entire intermission, incessantly dancing a sort of robotic polo shirt back and forth across the stage. Both decisions seem like affectations, with no discernible purpose, context or meaning other than looking cool. Both are also confusing to the audience and inconsiderate to the actors. But the inconveniences are trivial.
Still, these overtly artistic elements served as a clue—or turning point—that led me to question the piece as a whole: How much of it arises organically from an original artistic vision, and how much of it is a self-conscious attempt to enter the pantheon of the avant-garde?
“Hurricane Season” begins as the story of a middle-aged couple whose marriage has become loveless.
Anne (Melissa Rainey) is obsessed with natural and man-made disasters. She writes an article about irrational fears, intending to argue that, given the world is falling apart, no fears are irrational. (“A constant state of fear is a sign of a healthy mind.”) When she speaks out loud about various recent crises, her husband ignores her. Tom (Sam Ross), a day trader, is busy looking at numbers on his computer screen when he’s not watching pornography. That’s how he meets Alex (Erin Boswell), who performs for him on his laptop. Anne gets it, noticing that the younger Alex looks remarkably like Anne at that age.
Alex then performs a scene with male porn star Trevor (Pascal Portney), who looks remarkably similar to a younger version of Tom.
Soon Anne becomes obsessed with Alex, an American expat living in Amsterdam, and travels there to be with her; and Tom travels to Los Angeles to be with Trevor. Each of them has sex with their own doppelgänger.
There’s little point telling you more about the plot, because it gets even more illogical and doesn’t seem to be of primary interest to playwright and director Sawyer Estes. He wants to excite the audience, which is why there are scenes of PG-rated sex, and certainly why (the well-built) Portney spends most of the play in a bathing suit, flexing his muscles. Estes also seems to want to disturb us, which is why, to give just one example, Anne cuts her stomach with a knife so she can replicate a scar Alex has, thus becoming even more like her.
I’m sure Estes would say he also wants us to look at the deeper meaning.
I tried. I was initially fascinated by the idea of an older person searching for their younger self, seeing it as a metaphor for our attempts to recapture what gave us hope and vitality at that age (was much of it sex appeal/sexual appetite/sex?). I also tried to understand the connections Estes was obviously trying to make between threats to the earth, world crises, and personal misfortune. There are some tangible clues, thanks to two monologues, about a hurricane and about a tree in Tom and Anne’s yard that is destroyed by the hurricane (both voiced by Kathrine Barnes). There are also some isolated lines that resonate, particularly from Anne: “When we bought this house, I imagined this tree to be very different. I never imagined it split in two, sawed off, with branches broken off. I thought we’d have a kid and a tire swing.” They never had kids.
But at one point Anne says, “I want to speak clearly in riddles,” and that seems to be what the playwright wants most, even if not so clearly. Here is the scene where Alex invites Anne to Amsterdam:
Anne: It’s hurricane season and I imagine you’re the only stable thing.
Alex: Ashes to ashes.
Anne: Immobile.
Alex: Dust to dust.
Anne: Permanent, fixed.
Alex: I’m in Amsterdam. Come find me, bitch.
Anne: I don’t exist.
It’s not exactly reassuring that even the concrete details the characters mention—specific disasters, facts about nature—are vague or inaccurate (such as the name of a virus that caused an outbreak in Central America and the average number of sperm in a single ejaculation). This lack of research makes real-world suffering the verbal equivalent of a prop.
Hurricane Season is produced by Estes’ Atlanta-based Vernal & Sere Theater, which originally presented it there in 2022. The company is making its New York theater debut with the same cast as in Atlanta, which explains how bold they are. The design team, also largely retained from the original production, effectively confronts us with the chaos of the world through its bombardment of projections and sound.
There are some worthwhile moments in Hurricane Season, but they are too random and are overshadowed by the main impression we are left with: that the piece tries too hard to be trippy and transgressive.
Hurricane season
Theater Row until September 7
Playing time: Two hours, including intermission
Tickets: $50
Written and directed by Sawyer Estes
Erin O’Connor (movement director and assistant director), Josh Oberlander (set designer), Lindsey Sharpless (lighting design and stage manager), Matthew Shively (projection design), Zach Halaby and Kacie Willis (sound design), Mitch Butler (sound engineer) and Monty Wilson (production manager and set builder).
Cast: Erin Boswell as Alex, Pascal Portney as Trevor, Melissa Rainey as Anne, Sam Ross as Tom, Kathrine Barnes as Hurricane and Anne and Tom’s Tree.
Photographs by Richard Termine
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