INTERVIEW: In ‘Hurricane Season,’ two partners meet their younger doppelgängers
Photo: Hurricane Season stars, from left, Melissa Rainey and Sam R. Ross. Photo courtesy of Richard Termine / Provided by Everyman Agency with permission.
Hurricane Season, written and directed by Sawyer Estes, has made its New York debut at Theatre Row in Midtown Manhattan. The play, which first premiered in Atlanta and is presented by Vernal & Sere Theatre, follows a middle-aged wife and husband who open up their partnership and allow in another couple. These two outsiders, who are invited to become insiders, look somewhat like the middle-aged couple, only younger. One could even call them doppelgängers.
For Estes, the piece has gone through many transformations and was helped along after he worked on a production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. That experience changed him as an artist, and he wanted to make Hurricane Season an homage to that often-debated work.
“I think I began writing it in 2019,” Estes said about the early days of Hurricane Season. “Very soon after we did a production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis that kind of shifted my way of thinking about theater pretty fundamentally. I directed that piece, and typically the way I work, the subsequent work is a response to what we just did. In a lot of ways, it’s tearing it down and maybe restarting again or stealing something from what I’ve learned and then reincorporating it in a different way or slightly different form. So we finished 4.48 Psychosis, and then I began writing this piece in relation to that. It borrows quite a bit from it structurally, while being a lot more grounded and naturalistic.”
A few other theatrical projects and the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way of Estes fulfilling his vision of what Hurricane Season could be, but he picked up the pieces and staged the show in 2022 in Atlanta.
“After the staging of this, we knew that it might be a good piece to transfer, and since then, we haven’t done many rewrites,” he said. “But I went back and thought of that production that we did in 2022 and literally changed everything directorially, took it down to the studs and changed every inch of staging. There’s not a scene that’s the same, revised many of the technical elements, so I’m really excited now where we’re at with it.”
What New York audiences will see at Theatre Row, where Hurricane Seasons continues until Sept. 7, is a show that follows Estes’ original script but is worlds away from how it looked and felt during that 2022 stage production. This rendition stars Erin Boswell, Pascal Portney, Melissa Rainey, Sam Ross and Kathrine Barnes, according to press notes.
“I heard a lot of feedback from the community and people that I trust in Atlanta when we staged it the first time, and everyone was pretty sure that the script had something very valuable within it and was very well-written and constructed,” said Estes, whose other works include adaptations of Anne Carson’s poem The Glass Essay and Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel. “But there was just this sense that I’d hear little rumblings that directorially I missed the mark. Since then, I staged a really massive adaptation of a piece that I adapted and directed based on Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay. It was another eight-month process, probably 14 months from start to stop of it, and I think I just learned quite a bit on that process.”
After The Glass Essay, Estes was more comfortable as an artist, and he realized that as a director he could say more with less style. He was hooked on the idea of “theater of imagery,” but that wasn’t doing service to the words he had written. Ultimately, as a director, he needed to respect his role as a writer. He needed to trust himself.
“I think I made a dishonest play,” Estes admitted about the original production. “I didn’t do the service to the form that is this play. It’s kind of rooted in American naturalism, and I was trying to maybe put a little bit too much of an auteur, European style on it. I stepped away and had a couple more years to be more sure of myself and maybe not fuss it up with so many bells and whistles in terms of how we approach the acting and how we approach movement. … I’ve let [myself] trust the script this time, trust my own script like I would anyone else’s script, rather than trying to maybe fix my script, which is what I think I was trying to do a little bit the first time. Now I’m sitting back and letting the virtues of the play kind of speak for themselves and letting the actors work more freely and more intuitively. I think it’s worked very nicely, so I’m really excited.”
The play, which is erotic and provocative, tries to understand the motivations of this central couple who decide to have an open affair with their younger selves. What could that mean for their partnership? What are they searching for?
“An anxiety and dissatisfaction from their marriage, from their economic status in life,” Estes offered up as a motivation. “They have quite a lot, but they don’t feel like they have enough. And I think there’s this reaching out that really comes from a very general malaise and inability to feel alive and to feel satisfied within the systems in which they find themselves. … I think this reaching out for these young versions is an attempt to return to a simpler time or a time before all of the weight of being human, being alive, messed everything up.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Hurricane Season, written and directed by Sawyer Estes, continues through Sept. 7 at Theatre Row in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
