Theatre in Review: Hurricane Season (Vernal & Sere Theatre at Theatre Row)

	Pascal Portney, Erin Boswell. Photo: Richard Termine

Some plays conclude without the audience realizing it, leading to awkward curtain calls. This is true of Hurricane Season, but it also leaves one unclear about when the intermission begins. During a pause at the performance I attended, I noticed an entire row of people exiting the theatre. Were they fleeing en masse? Was that sporting? They couldn't wait for the house lights to come up? In fact, it was the end of Act I -- an usher confirmed the fact -- and they were merely headed to the bar for a refill; like good soldiers, they all returned for more -- which, come to think of it, shows a lot of character.

All this confusion about beginnings and endings tells you something about Hurricane Season, a strenuous exercise in sexual and existential angst so turned in on itself it barely seems to acknowledge the audience's presence. Actors enter before the show begins, crossing the stage at a crawl. Between acts, they remain onstage, taking part in a robotic movement sequence. (This, I feel, is cruel; everyone deserves a bathroom break and/or a chance to hydrate.) Playwright/director Sawyer Estes, taking a well-worn leaf from other avant-garde groups, has given his production a cool, distanced surface that leaves one feeling miles away from the stage.

The action begins with Anne and Tom, a middle-aged married couple living in one of the Carolinas. She is a journalist, working on a piece about "irrational fear" -- which, she feels, isn't irrational at all, pointing to a world engulfed by financial collapse, ethnic cleansing, and climate change. Tom, in contrast, is a day trader, focused entirely on numbers. Both, however, live for online porn: Tom is obsessed with the female Alex, who appears, variously, as a dominatrix, a stripper, and a slutty schoolgirl. Anne keeps tabs on Trevor, a well-marbled specimen who joins Alex for a naughty doctor sketch. (This part is confusing: Alex and Trevor live on different continents. Does the adult entertainment industry spring for international co-productions these days?) Anne and Tom do not hide their digital activities from each other: Tom, staring at Anne as she masturbates to an erotic video, says, "There must be something you're trying to tell me." (And they say men never notice anything!)

However, all marital communication is curtailed when Anne runs off to Amsterdam in search of Alex and Tom flies to Los Angeles, hoping to meet Trevor. (The reason for this sexual orientation swap-out is never made clear, although I guess it suits Estes' purposes.) The elders make contact with their young objects of desire -- Tom gets a bad sunburn while spying on Trevor working out on the beach -- and everybody gets laid. ("For the record," Anne says, "This is important to understand initially. I don't have a toe fetish." Based on the evidence, that's hard to believe.)

Happiness, however, proves elusive: Anne identifies with Alex to an alarming degree, even trying to replicate her new love's surgical scar. Trevor is a borderline psychopath obsessed with the unlikely idea that Tom, a former sperm donor, might be his biological father. (He is more than a little mixed up about the whole daddy-lover thing, an issue he can't stop discussing.) After many tormented conversations, everybody ends up back in Carolina, where a hurricane named Tanya (a talking weather event, voiced by Kathrine Barnes) has laid waste to Anne and Tom's place, cueing a roundelay of unsatisfactory assignations among the ruins.

Staged with considerable expertise in a production by the Atlanta-based company mentioned above, Hurricane Season is a mass of unconnected narrative dots. Alex, Anne, Tom, and Trevor -- souls divided against themselves -- are posed against a backdrop of global horrors, but what does one thing have to do with the other? The playwright never says: Anne and Tom's inability to achieve lasting sexual satisfaction is linked, vaguely, to living in a world wracked by capitalism and its discontents; Alex and Trevor are messed up by having to peddle their bodies for a living. (Trevor, in particular, is obsessed with staying fit, spending half his stage time on calisthenics; you've got to keep the merchandise in good shape.) But the play offers psychology without characters; instead, we get a quartet of uninteresting basket cases meditating, solemnly, on their unhappiness.

For the most part, Estes' design team delivers the visual and auditory effects that the play demands. Josh Oberlander's sparely designed set collapses on cue; before that, it provides a solid surface for Matthew Shively's compelling projections, which combine footage of war zones and extreme weather events with close-ups of the actors' faces. Zach Halaby and Kacie Willis' sound design is a multilayered wonder, especially in the transition from the preshow to the play's opening, made up of news reports, carnival music, chimes, static, and a lecture on power steering systems. (Why these elements? No idea, but the cumulative effect is disturbing enough to raise an expectation that the rest of Hurricane Season never matches.) By contrast, Lindsey Sharpless' lighting, relying almost entirely on a handful of overhead positions, delivers a series of color washes lacking in definition. (One wonders if, having splurged on video and sound, the producers decided to economize elsewhere; if so, they are being penny-wise and pound-foolish.)

All four cast members are solid, but the standouts are Melissa Rainey, who tears into Anne's fevered catalogs of atrocities with brio, and Pascal Portney, who navigates Trevor's hairpin emotional turns like a Formula 1 driver. This is nothing against Erin Boswell as Alex and Sam R. Ross as Tom, but their roles lack the other characters' pyrotechnics. The actors also put themselves energetically through the paces of Erin O'Connor's movement sequences.

But Hurricane Season is constructed on two lines of thought that never merge. It also has a second-hand quality: In a program note, Estes says, "On its surface a simple sexual fever dream for an American couple who might populate the canonical plays of an Albee or Miller, it is made complicated by its state of disrepair and brokenness." This is the Wooster Group or Elevator Repair Service approach -- all deconstruction, all the time -- and it leaves one pining for Albee's scabrous wit or Miller's sociopolitical insights. Hurricane Season wants you to know we're hurtling toward hell in a handcart at supersonic speed. Really, tell us something new. --David Barbour