Julia McDermott plays a TV meteorologist on the edge in Weather Girl (photo by Emilio Madrid)
WEATHER GIRL
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through October 12
stannswarehouse.org
Julia McDermott is mesmerizing as a Fresno morning show meteorologist desperate to find shelter from the storm in Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl, continuing at St. Ann’s Warehouse through October 12.
“People always said I was destined to become a weather girl . . . That I always ‘had that look.’ I think it might’ve been more that I had a crippling fear of being killed by an act of god,” KCRON’s Stacey Gross (McDermott) says as the solo show begins. She talks about how she has to get up at 4:00 for her job, a time at which, someone once told her, according to the Bible, “sin enters the world. . . . And at a quarter past four you feel all the destroyed things swimming around in the dark and when you do the weather here in California you can sometimes feel the devil’s breath right at your earlobe.”
Standing in a cramped TV-studio green-screen setup with lights and microphones, dressed in a low-cut red blouse, supertight pink skirt, and heels (the costume is by Rachel Dainer-Best), Stacey explains the reason why she thinks we are all here: “to bring the inside outside.” And for the next seventy minutes, she spills her guts, literally and figuratively, in hilarious and heart-wrenching ways.
In her cheery on-air disposition, she reports from the field on the Coalinga wildfire, focusing on a specific house burning in a cul-de-sac, noting that the “wildfire hopped the freeway at 4 am.” Lifting up her ever-present Stanley Quencher, she declares to the anchors in the studio, “They need a few more of these out here!” But it’s not water in the giant cup; she’s drinking Prosecco.
She’s devastated when she learns the next day that a family of five and their two dogs perished in that house fire; moments later, Jerry, the station manager, tells her she is being promoted to the Phoenix gig, a move she is not happy about. “Fuck you, Jerry,” she responds several times, although she is not sure if she actually said it out loud. As her colleagues congratulate her, she says/thinks, “Fuck you guys I’m gonna murder you guys.”
Stacey explains to the audience that the reason she does the weather is because “there’s some things you can’t change,” referring primarily to her difficult childhood with foster parents because her mother, Magdalena, preferred drugs to a house, but also alluding to global warming and environmental disaster. She hasn’t seen her mom, who is homeless, in a while, but wonders how she is doing, “if she’s out there somewhere dying of thirst and heat and smoke.” The California drought serves as a constant metaphor for her life, which is devoid of family, friends, or a significant other. Instead, she has cheap sex with a man she meets online, never bothering to learn his name while getting loaded on wine during a wild night that does not end well.
She does find her mother, who asks her, “Have you said things you didn’t intend to say? Are you always thirsty?” letting her know that she likely has inherited a magical power from her as Magdalena talks about Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus performing miracles involving water.
But when Stacey asks her mother to teach her, things start getting really weird.
Weather girl Stacey Gross (McDermott) is concerned about climate change and more at St. Ann’s Warehouse (photo by Emilio Madrid)
Winner of a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, Weather Girl is directed with a fiery fury by Tyne Rafaeli (Becoming Eve, The Coast Starlight), occasionally going over the top as Watkins’s (Epiphany, Evergreens) otherwise tight script goes too far a few times, especially in an overwrought on-air confession. Isabella Byrd’s set and lighting keep it all intimate; curiously, the sound, by Kieran Lucas, features Stacey at the same vocal level whether she uses a microphone or doesn’t.
McDermott (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Orpheus Descending) expertly portrays the pathos and bathos of Stacey and her mixed-up life, turning the stereotype of the beautiful blond ditzy weather girl on its head. Stacey is a complex woman whose insides are drying out as her exterior continues to be celebrated on its slick surface, even as she falls apart.
But at the center is the miracle of water, which makes up between sixty and seventy percent of the human body and about seventy-one percent of the planet; without water, everything would die.
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress,” Margaret Atwood writes in The Penelopiad. “Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
Words to live by, for Stacey and the rest of us as we watch the world burn.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]