It would be silly to dismiss “Hurricane Season” just because the production has no curtain call, and the cast is made to work during the entire intermission, performing a kind of robotic conga line ceaselessly back and forth across the stage. Both of these choices feel like affectations, without any decipherable purpose or context or meaning other than to come off as cool. Both are also confusing to the audience and inconsiderate toward the actors. But the inconvenience is trivial.

Still, these manifestly artsy touches served as a tip-off – or a tipping point – that led me to a question I had about the play as a whole: How much of it springs organically from an original artistic vision, and how much of it is a self-conscious effort to join the pantheon of the avant-garde?

 “Hurricane Season” begins as the story of a middle-aged couple in a now-loveless marriage.

Anne (Melissa Rainey) is obsessed with both natural and man-made catastrophes, and is writing an article about irrational fears, planning to argue that no fears are irrational, given the state of collapse in the world. (“a constant state of fear is a sign of a healthy mind. “) When she talks aloud 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 looking at pornography. This is how he meets Alex (Erin Boswell), who performs for him on his laptop. Anne catches on, and notices that the younger Alex looks remarkably similar to the way Anne looked at that age.

Alex then performs a scene with a male porn star, Trevor (Pascal Portney) who looks remarkably like a younger version of Tom. 

Soon Anne becomes obsessed with Alex, an American ex-pat who is living in Amsterdam, and so travels to Amsterdam to be with her; and Tom travels to Los Angeles, to be with Trevor. Each has sex with their own doppelganger.

There is little point in telling you more about the plot, because it gets even less logical, and doesn’t seem of primary interest to playwright and director Sawyer Estes. He wants to titillate the audience, which is why there are (PG13-level) sex scenes, and surely why (the well-built) Portney spends most of the play in a bathing suit, flexing. Estes also seems to want to disturb us, which is why, to pick just one example, Anne cuts her stomach with a knife so that she can replicate a scar that Alex has, and thus be even more like her. 

I’m sure Estes would say he also wants us to delve into the deeper meaning.

I tried. I was initially intrigued with the idea of an older person seeking out his or her younger self, seeing it as a metaphor for our attempts to recapture what it was that made us feel hopeful and alive at that age (Was much of it sex appeal/sexual appetite/sex?) I also tried to figure out the connections Estes was evidently trying to make between threats to the earth, world crises, and personal unhappiness.  There are some palpable hints, thanks to two monologues, by a hurricane and by a tree in Tom and Anne’s backyard that the hurricane destroys (both portrayed in voiceover by Kathrine Barnes.) There are also some stray lines that resonate, especially from Anne: “When we bought this house I pictured this tree much differently. Never did I imagine it split in two, cut open, and branches broken. I thought we’d have a kid and a tire swing.” They never did have children.

But at one point Anne says “What I want is to speak in riddles plainly,” and that is what the playwright seems to want to do most of all, though not so plainly. Here is the scene in which Alex invites Anne to Amsterdam:

Anne: It is hurricane season and I imagine you as the only thing solid. 

Alex: Ash to ash. 

Anne: Unmoving. 

Alex: Dust to dust. 

Anne: Permanent, fixed. 

Alex: I’m in Amsterdam. Come find me, bitch. 

Anne: I do not exist. 

It isn’t reassuring that even the concrete details that the characters mention – specific catastrophes, 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 spermatozoa in a single ejaculation.)  This lack of research turns the real-life suffering in the world into 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 performed in Atlanta, which helps explain how game they are. The design team, also largely imported from the original production, through their bombardment of projections and sound effectively bring us face to face with the chaos of the world.

There are worthwhile moments in “Hurricane Season” but they are too random, and they are overshadowed by the main impression we’re left with — that the play tries too hard to be trippy and transgressive.

Hurricane Season
Theater Row through September 7
Running time: Two hours, including an intermission
Tickets: $50
Written and directed by Sawyer Estes
Erin O’Connor (movement direction and assistant director), Josh Oberlander (scenic design), 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 scenic construction).
Cast: Erin Boswell as Alex , Pascal Portney as Trevor, Melissa Rainey as Anne, and Sam Ross as Tom, Kathrine Barnes as a hurricane and Anne and Tom’s tree.
Photographs by Richard Termine