Hurricane Season

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Although Sawyer Estes’ new play Hurricane Season purports to be about the intersection between erotic desire and national anxiety, this production from Atlanta’s Vernal & Sere Theatre is sabotaged by the distracting, noisy and continually flashing video projection clips by Matthew Shively in the first act on all three walls of the set. The second act is done in by the set design by Josh Oberlander and the poor sound design from Zach Halaby and Kacie Willis which causes the action to be furthest away from the audience, often up or under empty archways which have been revealed due to a hurricane in the Carolinas during the intermission.

Ironically, the play is directed by the playwright so that he must have known what he was getting from his designers. None of this unnecessary production detail is described in the script. It would probably be less difficult to follow and more interesting as a play without all this sound and imagery getting in the way of following this confused and confusing mise-en-scène. The play is said to be inspired by the work of Ingmar Bergman, Harold Pinter, Sarah Kane, and Anne Carson but Estes does not seem to have learned his lessons from them very well. The play is garbled and bewildering which one cannot say about the pure drama from these authors and auteurs. The title appears to be a poetic metaphor as the actual hurricane takes place between the acts and has little to do with the plot other than suggest a theme.

What can be pieced together from reading the script (not watching the production), Anne and Tom who have been married 30 years have drifted apart. She is obsessed with frightening current events and he is following the vicissitudes of the stock market. While she is writing an article for publication on irrational fear, he claims to be a day trader waiting for the market to open at 9:30 AM. In fact, they both take turns watching porn on their one laptop, performed by a young couple (Alex and Trevor) who resemble them when younger. (We witness this rather simplistic sex display which is enacted for us in an alcove behind the couple’s living room on stage left.)

Both become so enamored of the porn stars that Anne follows Alex to Amsterdam and Tom follows Trevor to Los Angeles. (How they know where to find them is never revealed.) There they both begin same-sex affairs with what they see as their doppelgangers although none of them are gay. They also do not discuss where the married couple has seen the actors before. In the second act, all four reassemble at the couple’s Carolina home after an Eastern hurricane which we witness as the back wall of the set falls down to reveal a downed tree. Unfortunately, the foursome are not as compatible as they thought they would be and things go downhill from there.

This is the sort of deficient script in which we learn almost nothing of the characters: all we learn about Trevor is that, having never known his father, he has been in search of one all his young life, and that Alex has a scar on her abdomen but we are never told how she got it, whether it is from a C-section, an accident or an assault. Although the cast has previously performed the play in Atlanta, Estes’ play and direction give them little latitude. They are always angry and not much else throughout the play. For the record, the game cast includes Melissa Rainey as Anne, Sam R Ross as Tom, Erin Boswell as Alex and Pascal Portney as Trevor (who spends most of the play in swim trunks and nothing else. His continual workout on the beach must be as tiring for the actor as it is for the audience to watch.) The off stage Kathrine Barnes voices the hurricane and fallen tree twice in the second act in two monologues which would have been best left to another play though she does very well with these intrusive speeches.

Creech’s living room set in Act One is devoid of character, while the beach scenes in LA and the restaurant and bedroom scenes in Amsterdam are created by video which is divided down the middle in a split screen effect. The uncredited costumes are extremely bland which does the play little favor. The fussy lighting by Lindsey Sharpless is often dark, at other times changes color for no apparent reason, but rarely creates the needed mood. However, it is Shively’s video projection which makes the play difficult to watch and listen to as it is so distracting like a late Godard movie in which all one can do is lie back and let the imagery wash over you as you cannot look away from it in order to concentrate on the play.

Hurricane Season is the sort of vanity production in which one assumes that the author thinks he or she has invented the next step in the avant-garde. Unfortunately, Estes’ production will give most theatergoers a headache attempting to follow his play as well as the unnecessary flashing video. Whatever the play wants to say about “erotic desire and national anxiety,” it is lost in the proceedings on stage. Incidentally in the cause of transparency, Hurricane Season is not the least bit erotic though there is a certain amount of simulated sex.

Hurricane Season (through September 7, 2024)

Vernal & Sere Theatre

Theatre Four on Theatre Row,  410 W. 42^nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.hurricaneseasonplay.com

Running time: two hours including one intermission