Review: Challenging, erotic “Hurricane Season” stretches audience boundaries

Hurricane Season, the new Vernal & Sere Theatre production onstage at Windmill Arts Center in East Point through October 23, aims to attract and repulse its audience, often in the same moment, as a way of testing its limits. On one hand, it’s a kinky and sexy show about a middle-aged couple rediscovering their connection and lost youth through pornography. But it’s also an intentionally triggering, difficult piece with moments that make you wince, cringe and look away.

This confident, bold work from playwright and director Sawyer Estes and the troupe is an act of trust. Only artists who trust that their audience and performers won’t bolt for the doors in terror would dare tell a story this wild in a manner this athletic, erotic, violent and challenging.

Last year, Vernal & Sere presented Estes’ adaptation on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, which was a weird and amazing response to the pandemic, class warfare and human isolation. Hurricane Season is an original work, still as experimental, but it’s more intimate in many ways. It has a cast of only four performers, and it deals rather frankly with sex, emotion, aging and marriage.

The plot of Hurricane Season sounds crazy on its surface, but Vernal & Sere Theatre’s works are never straightforward with a singular theme or clear message. 

Anne (Melissa Rainey) and Tom (Sam Ross) are stuck in a loveless marriage, living somewhere along the Carolina coast. She’s haunted by headlines of violence and hurricanes, and he’s distracted by internet pornography and day trading. Anne wonders if they ever loved one another, only to discover that Tom’s favorite porn star Alex (Erin Boswell) looks exactly like a younger Anne. She’s jealous yet intrigued. Tom finds a male porn star named Trevor (Pascal Portney), who also looks like his younger self. 

So Anne and Tom leave their family home and hop onto separate planes to track down their erotic doppelgangers. Then, literal and metaphorical self-love happens. There’s also self-harm and mutilation, hints of incest, a talking tree and a cowboy costume. A storm comes, disrupting the story of this marriage even further.

To paraphrase film critic Roger Ebert, it’s not what a story is about — it’s how it’s about it. 

Throughout the show, Estes tries to titillate the audience with taboo kink, then makes us question our own tastes and lusts by making the arrow waver on everyone’s moral compass. The actors are presented as physical specimens, then contorted into incredibly difficult positions for long periods of time. 

The feelings this generates for the characters and the audience are layered. Characters end up aroused, then doubting themselves. Members of the audience should be able to relate.

The stage picture is eerie and off-putting at every moment of this show. Bright projections and the soundtrack of educational films run as the audience enters the space before the play even begins. When the actors enter, they move slowly across the room to their chairs, not acknowledging one another. Then one actor begins watching porn on a laptop. Suddenly, there are hiccups in the noise, interruptions in the projections and random moans of ecstasy. 

The effect is intriguing and uneasy. The technical skill needed to create such a weird, creepy space merits praise. Vernal & Sere presents Hurricane Season with projected video perfectly synced with onstage action and harsh, colorful lighting from designer Lindsey Sharpless. Set designer Josh Oberlander’s work is impressive, particularly during the second act of the show, when an average family home is ripped to pieces.

The choreography from movement director Erin O’Connor and intimacy direction from Daniela Santiago also deserve applause for preparing their performers for nearly three hours of physical exertion and emotional vulnerability. Much of the athleticism showcased looks intensely difficult. The performers rarely leave the stage, not even during intermission when they are constantly running in circles onstage.The actors are an incredible, committed team in this piece.

As Anne, Rainey is often given diatribes of worried narration that she must speak to herself instead of talking directly to her husband. When Anne meets Alex, she feels both aroused and confused, uncertain if she’s attracted to someone new or just the person that she once was. Rainey gets a stunning moment to play at the end of the first act, one that terrifies the audience while daring them not to look away.

Ross’s Tom has difficulty expressing outright joy and desire, nervous that it will leave him vulnerable. He’s also scared to find himself attracted to a man, to the point that he’d rather suffer a sunburn than have a conversation with his object of desire. Tom is the one whose emotions most quickly slide from desire to disgust.

Portney, playing Trevor, gives the character a childlike goofiness, and the character alternates between silliness and total insecurity. Trevor is seeking a father figure, and, as a sex worker, he knows he is objectified and valued for his body. Though the character frequently seems impulsive and dangerous, Trevor is confident of his beauty. Portney spends most of the play in a very small swimsuit, doing yoga stretches or simulating sex acts. It’s a bold, impressive performance that contains complicated layers; Portney is playing an objectified, misused character by placing himself in vulnerable, revealing situations.

Boswell’s character has tremendous spark, and her flirtation scenes with Rainey are absolutely charming. Alex is confident and self-reliant, and meeting someone who seems to be her double threatens her sense of self and worldview. She doesn’t want complicated feelings or codependency. She appreciates freedom and fun. Meeting Anne upends her world.

Hurricane Season is an incredibly strange show with no easy answers. It dwells in a dark place, but it is thought-provoking and worthy.

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Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His novel Impacted was published by The Story Plant in 2021.