“Weather Girl,” a solo play about the California climate apocalypse, was a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe that Netflix is said to be developing into a series. “Fleabag,” “Baby Reindeer” and “Angry Alan,”  three other Fringe hits that went on to a wider audience, had the same producer, Francesca Moody. And, as with the stars of those three other plays, Julia McDermott gives a skillful performance that’s comic only on the surface, turning increasingly dark.

In “Weather Girl,” written by Brian Watkins (McDermott’s partner), and opening today at St Ann’s Warehouse, McDermott portrays Stacey Gross, who reports about the weather for a local television station in Fresno, California. She seems as perky and put together as you would expect, engaging in happy talk with the news anchors while reporting on wildfire-ignited residences and 98-degree temperature as if everyday occurrences. But from the start, something is off about her.

The narrator as well as the central character, she tells us she’s always had “a crippling fear of being killed by an act of god,” and she soon confesses that she’s an alcoholic, drinking from a travel mug full of prosecco or vodka while on air, and that she grew up in foster care, abandoned by her mother, who is now homeless, possibly insane, and probably still nearby somewhere.  “The strange truth is that she loves drugs more than homes,” Stacey says about her mother, “and she doesn’t want a house; she wants a miracle. She wants transcendence, not me.”

Over the next hour, both Stacey, and Watkins’ play, become more and more unhinged. She goes on a date with a wealthy tech bro whose name she can’t remember, asks to drive his bright yellow speedster, and (deliberately?)crashes the car, sending him to the hospital.  She tracks down her mother, who is still homeless, but goes to karaoke bars, attends “Thoroughly Modern Millie, staying awake only for the songs, and performs miracles – specifically, makes water materialize from nowhere. 

“‘I made it,’ she says. You made it how? Are you a fish? And she says… ‘Well there’s water all around us — in the air, under the ground, liquid, solid, vapor, all you have to do is listen to collect it.’”

“Weather Girl” has a plot of sorts, although it’s not especially detailed or what you could call linear; I’d be surprised if the Netflix series sticks to it (assuming a Netflix series actually materializes.) In a program note, Watkin explains that he wrote the play to address the question: “Why do we wreck the places we love?” He explicitly means California, and implicitly Planet Earth. In answer, he  packs his play with numerous ways we are all complicit.  To give one example: During the date with the tech bro, he tells her he’s  “part of a startup that’s building six hundred ‘smart homes’ nearby, and I say what about the water crisis, where will they get their water, and he says I dunno someone’ll figure it out” (Is this why she crashes his car? If so, the dots aren’t directly connected.)

It’s not the plot nor the points that exert the biggest pull for “Weather Girl.” It’s how Julia McDermott’s performance holds all the elements together, even as everything is flying apart.

Weather Girl
St Ann’s Warehouse through October 12
Running time: 70 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $59 – $79
Written by Brian Watkins
Starring Julia McDermott
Directed by Tyne Rafaeli
Set and lighting design by Isabella Byrd, costume design by Rachel Dainer-Best, sound design by Kieran Lucas, 
Photographs by Emilio Madrid