“Hurricane Season” at Theatre Row (Photo: Richard Termine)
Atlanta-based company Vernal & Sere Theatre brings their 2022 production Hurricane Season to Theatre Row in their New York debut. This original play, written and directed by Sawyer Estes, focuses on a middle-aged couple, Anne (Melissa Rainey) and Tom (Sam R. Ross), at a breaking point in their marriage. Anne wants to talk about current events over coffee, Tom wants to watch porn on their shared computer. Anne partakes of some porn herself and has such a shattering orgasm that she goes to Amsterdam to connect with the woman in the video. Tom follows suit, tracking a male porn star to the beach in Los Angeles. The younger pair eerily mirror Anne and Tom in appearance and, as they have sex, a bond is formed, across the age gap and, well, maybe across a metaphysical gap, too.
Even that description fails to encapsulate what Estes’ play is doing. But it’s a fool’s errand to try to nail it down – the language is abstract, the motivations purposely opaque, the plot beside the point. There are dance numbers, there are long, wordless moments, there are collage-like projections (by Matthew Shivley) that wash over the walls of Anne and Tom’s living room. Estes is more concerned with the overall mood of the play than anything else.
It’s successful when the design elements, the poetry in Estes’ language, and the actors’ understanding of a moment’s purpose coalesce to convey the emotional undercurrent, raising the subtext to the surface. But, too often, the play feels like a hodgepodge of ideas and the internal logic of Estes’ world veers too broadly between the abstract, the absurd, and the realistic. The characters are hard to connect with because they don’t seem like the same person moment-to-moment. We don’t really get to know them, we just see them do mystifying things. We are all works in progress, sure, but the nature of Estes’ writing and staging doesn’t let us connect the dots to understand why anything is happening.
Why do the sexworkers, Alex (Erin Boswell) and Trevor (a truly excellent Pascal Portney), volunteer to fuck Anne and Tom, people who have stalked them across either the country or the Atlantic? If, as the play suggests, they are nonrealistic mirror images of Anne and Tom, how did the older couple watch their porn videos online and how did Alex and Trevor work together independently of Anne and Tom? Tom becomes obsessed with Trevor’s body, perhaps seeing his younger self, and Trevor almost immediately sucks Tom off. Anne and Alex also have an extended sex scene after Anne finds Alex at a cafe in Amsterdam. Neither member of the older couple ever discusses this new aspect of their sexuality, something characters at that age would probably acknowledge. There’s no implication of latent homo- or bisexual desire, just the thirst to join with the body of their younger self.
That Alex and Trevor both exist and do not exist at the same time is one of the hardest obstacles to get past. Trevor proudly proclaims that he’s gay, but Tom is not. So why does Tom see himself in this young gay man? Trevor also works in straight porn, but is gay, which offers its own set of questions. While Trevor’s body is his currency, Alex seems beleaguered and worn down, which is not the idealized younger version Anne would probably want to see. Trevor wears only a skimpy drawstring swimsuit, while Alex dons a baggy t-shirt, like she just rolled out of bed. The play is not clear enough about this disparity in the younger characters’ outward presentation.
The promotional materials for Hurricane Season list its inspirations as Ingmar Bergman, Anne Carson, and Sarah Kane, three of my favorite artists and writers, which was a huge factor in my need to see this play. But that’s a blessing and curse – it got me there, but it’s a tall order to live up to the work of those three geniuses. Bergman, Carson, and Kane excel in the abstract space Estes is attempting to ape, but they are all laser-focused in their intention and the worlds they create have iron-clad rules that they follow within their nonlinear, nontraditional shapes. I longed for some of that rigor in Hurricane Season.