Theater review by Raven Snook
Everywhere in Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl, the heat is on: Temperatures are rising, fire is spreading and local meteorologist Stacey Gross is the hottest mess on TV. The camera-ready California blonde, played rivetingly by Julia McDermott, spirals downward as the news gets worse, evolving from perky prognosticator to inconvenient-truth teller and crying in vain for help as she swigs Prosecco on air, shares a disturbingly despondent take on "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" and grapples with her mommy issues after a childhood spent in foster care. She’s a disaster, and you can’t look away.
Weather Girl | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Netflix has optioned this solo show for development, and it’s easy to see why. As a character study, Weather Girl sizzles. Watkins wrote the role of Stacey for McDermott, his offstage partner, and she is blazing in it: scary in her self-destructiveness but always sympathetic as she cracks up and cracks down. Director Tyne Rafaeli injects a sense of action by having McDermott—costumed by Rachel Dainer-Best in an appropriately pink and red ensemble—move around the spare set like a trapped animal, speaking into different mics as she channels various people she encounters in her long day's journey into blight. Isabella Byrd's heart-thumping sound design and Emily Schmit's evocative lighting suggest the horrors inside Stacey’s head as well as those in the world outside.
As an allegory of environmental apocalypse, however, Weather Girl is less persuasive. Watkins's look at climate change, consumerism and collective amnesia is vividly written, but its tone and takeaway are a little perplexing. In a key throughline about Stacey’s homeless mother, who registers as a stand-in for Mother Nature herself, the play dangles the possibility that a miracle might save us all. Amid the play’s dark satire—about how most of us are doomscrolling when we should be doomsaying—this idea pokes through as too sunny a hope.
Weather Girl. St. Ann's Warehouse (Off Broadway). By Brian Watkins. Directed by Tyne Rafaeli. With Julia McDermott. Running time: 1hr 10mins. No intermission.
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Weather Girl | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
