Julia McDermott is Stacey Gross, the meteorologist at the center of Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl, currently playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl is a state-of-the-nation play that delivers 70 minutes of theatrical fireworks and a dire warning. No names of politicians or officeholders get mentioned; no political parties or ideologies are discussed. Yet Weather Girl is unmistakably about our nation’s well-being (or lack thereof), with special attention to the lethal effect we’ve had on the earth and its atmosphere.
The protagonist of Watkins’s white-knuckle drama is Stacey Gross (Julia McDermott, the play’s sole actor), a television weather reporter for fictional KCRON in Fresno. Wherever she goes, Stacey is lionized (though she’s merely a local celebrity). Tech bros squire her around town; she’s chagrined they’re “destroying the world,” but has made peace with that. Satisfied in her existence, she’s declining a transfer to the more prominent Phoenix television market, despite the doubled salary that would go with it.
As the title character of Weather Girl, McDermott smiles at the television camera and surreptitiously drinks Prosecco from her travel mug. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
California is in year three of a major drought. Flames are lapping up foliage and everything else in their path, darkening the sky with smoke and poisoning the atmosphere. A quarter million Californians are unhoused. As Stacey does a remote telecast about the Coalinga wildfires, a family dies in a burning residence nearby. “Three kids, two adults, couple dogs,” a cameraman tells her. “They didn’t wanna evacuate … thought it was a government hoax.”
As it dawns on Stacey that a lot around her is off-kilter, she becomes mindful of unnerving aspects in her own behavior. She has $90,000 in credit-card debt. A functioning alcoholic since college, she’s now knocking back Prosecco from a travel mug while on the job (even while on camera). She’s surrendering to self-destructive impulses, such as refusing that advantageous transfer to Phoenix, telling her boss she’s going to murder him, and intentionally smashing a date’s sports car into the rear of another vehicle. And periodically—with accelerating frequency—she’s losing control of her body, feeling a pull “from inside” that drags her toward the ground.
With her anxiety accelerating, Stacey frets about the safety of her birth mother, Magdalena, an unhoused woman she hardly knows but checks on from time to time. According to Stacey, Magdalena “loves drugs more than homes” and “wants transcendence” rather than a daughter. Stacey locates Magdalena and, with fire homing in on both the encampment where Magdalena beds down and the neighborhood where Stacey lives, the two try to collaborate on a miracle while pursuing their respective forms of transcendence.
Director Tyne Rafaeli sets a sprinter’s pace for Weather Girl, ensuring that it’s engrossing from first moment to last. But the play’s gale-force impact owes less to pace than to the intricate, multifaceted characterization of the beleaguered Stacey, both in Watkins’s surehanded text and McDermott’s ravishing performance.
Prior to bringing her unrestrained performance in Weather Girl to St. Ann’s, McDermott appeared in the play’s premiere at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and its acclaimed London engagement.
Stacey’s insipidly toned chatter, va-va-voom figure, skintight clothes, and poofy, bottle-blonde hair suggest she’s lame-brained and shallow; but landing a job like hers requires a lot in the way of intellect (the academic requirements include, at a minimum, calculus, differential equations, physics, fluid dynamics, synoptic and mesoscale meteorology, thermodynamics, and computer modeling). In McDermott’s high-voltage performance, Stacey’s intelligence, poor judgment, courage, spells of cowardice, self-destructive impulses, rage, and benevolence coexist with verisimilitude. What seals Stacey’s allure, though, is McDermott’s large measure of an inborn quality: stage presence.
Isabella Byrd, designing both lighting and set, has created an abstract environment that morphs smoothly from one location to another (television studio, disco, site of a brush fire, speeding sports car, to name a few). The intense colors of her lighting plot evoke extreme weather and out-of-control conflagration vividly and sometimes to a surrealistic degree. Byrd and sound designer Kieran Lucas enhance exponentially the suspense of Watkins’s script and McDermott’s portrait of anxiety giving way to out-and-out terror.
Weather Girl is reminiscent of Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, a similarly compact yet potent satire with a comparably bleak California setting. Stacey’s angst and disintegrating grip on reality reflect, in miniature, the current socio-political moment and set it in an apocalyptic context much like West’s great novel. Late in the play, when Stacey and Magdalena speak about special gifts proffered by nature, Magdalena remarks that the important thing isn’t “what you gain from the gift” but “how you receive what’s given.”
Hearing that, it’s difficult not to think of our once innocent earth, the ingratitude with which humankind has received it, and what that portends not just for us but for our descendants. Weather Girl warns that the United States is in desperate straits, but proves American playwriting is going strong.
Weather Girl, produced by Francesca Moody, runs through Sunday, October 12 at St. Ann’s Warehouse (45 Water St., Brooklyn). Evening performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; matinees are Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and Sunday at 5:00 p.m. For tickets and information, visit stannswarehouse.org.
Playwright: Brian Watkins
Director: Tyne Rafaeli
Set & Lighting Design: Isabella Byrd
Costume Design: Rachel Dainer-Best
Sound Design: Kieran Lucas
