Review: Joy, Division: Hurricane Season Proves that Love Will Tear Us Apart Again, and Again

Hurricane Season

Written and directed by Sawyer Estes

Presented by Vernal & Sere Theatre at Theatre Row

410 W 42nd St, Manhattan, NYC

August 23-September 7, 2024

L to R: Sam R Ross, Pascal Portney, Erin Boswell, Melissa Rainey. Photo by Richard Termine
A storm is coming and there will be no shelter – no one will find quarter in Sawyer Estes’s visionary play Hurricane Season. This surrealist two-act marvel sees four lost souls drawn together by the digital drudgery of internet pornography only to collide in the corporeal: a journey from the Carolinas to Los Angeles/Amsterdam and then home again to what ultimately remains of the Carolinas. Though the titular hurricane would ostensibly hug the Gulf and Atlantic costs, the gyre widens, entropy inescapable, blowing across the globe.

Tom (Sam R Ross) and Anne (Melissa Rainey) are a middle-aged couple in the doldrums of a loveless marriage surrounded by a world of crises and tumult. He seemingly fills his time occupied with dual interests in porn and the stock market; she does the same with the more catastrophic news of the day (and also porn.) Both are wounded, possess a lacuna, and attempt fill the void first with said pornography, and then in the pursuit of the films’ featured performers – a journey which sends Tom to LA and actor Trevor (Pascal Portney) while Anne flees to Amsterdam and actress Alex (Erin Boswell). Who and what Tom and Anne find and ultimately bring back from their respective travels is unclear – are Trevor and Alex their younger doppelgangers? their children? new lovers? And in a production as dynamic, experimental and surrealistic as Estes’s, these recursive ambiguities fold over on themselves with seemingly no limit, the blurred definitions and stark dichotomies reflected in nearly every element of the production – script, sound direction, pacing, costuming, and set design.
L to R: Pascal Portney, Melissa Rainey, Erin Boswell, Sam R Ross. Photo by Richard Termine
All four performances are expert. Ross’s Tom, outfitted in khaki and a sometimes-bare chest, is played reserved, vulnerable, earnest. Rainey, giving American Gothic-cum-coastal Carolinas, is arresting, a nuanced display of the complexities of age, capturing a deep sense of yearning, fear, and a deep capacity for love. Their domestic dynamic, talking past and over each other, almost through each other, is pitch perfect.

Portney plays the often bathing-suit clad Trevor with an effortless cool and simmering darkness; one could hardly fault Tom (or anyone) for his transcontinental pursuit of this beauty and youth. Boswell’s Alex is a revelation in an over-large Unknown Pleasures t-shirt, commanding her scenes with vigor and vitriol.

The production demands quite a bit of this adept troupe, and fortunately they are in kind and competent hands. The actors are on stage the whole time, through the intermission like the titular storm, unabating. Estes’s script is tack-sharp, the sometimes dryly witty, sometimes cryptic lines showing and obscuring, inviting and challenging the audience all at once.
L to R: Pascal Portney, Melissa Rainey, Sam R Ross. Photo by Richard Termine
The set transforms along with the action, the characters, the hurricane. It all starts simply enough: the domestic banalities of a fireplace and computer desk and the awful warming glow of a laptop screen. These are rendered beyond their superficial innocuity, moving the setting and our characters into more unmoored and ambiguous space with the use of well-placed projections. These dynamic projections of stock tickers, the actors’ faces, alone, sometimes blending; the use of strobe; and appropriately chaotic sound design transport the audience across the globe and back again, and far from the reaches of realism. (Yet we too, like Anne, cannot escape the news of global catastrophe.)

The set transforms in act two as the storm has tracked through the Carolinas, trashing the home, pulling down a beloved tree, and pulling away the walls which seemingly separate the stage from backstage. The physical destruction and drywall-bare revelation holds the mirror up one last horrifying time: this time to pose (and ultimately leave unanswered) the question of whether or not Tom and Anne too have experienced an apocalyptic confrontation, nakedness and revelation in their sojourns for self across the globe and while coming home.

-Noah Simon Jampol

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