Stacey Gross, the TV meteorologist portrayed by Julia McDermott in Brian Watkins’s solo play “Weather Girl,” has perkiness down pat. In front of the cameras at her local station in Fresno, Calif., she is superficiality itself, with an aspect that you might call sunny if the sun were not so relentlessly baking the landscape.
“We got b-and-b weather for Sunday, folks, and by that I mean brunch and barbecue,” she tells her viewers, forecasting a temperature of 98 degrees while chirpily mentioning one wildfire, some smog and “a little smoke advisory in effect” — nothing to worry about. “All in all, pretty great day to be in California,” she says, handing off. “Now here’s Jackie with your traffic.”
It’s not an easy facade to maintain, but the prosecco in Stacey’s ever-present travel mug facilitates tranquillity. Until, that is, the climate-change menace becomes too immediate: wildfires closing in, threatening people’s survival — her own mother’s, even. About an hour into this 70-minute dark comedy, running through Oct. 12 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Stacey opts for honesty, live on air — a chaotic outburst that brings the movie “Network” to mind.
In the headlong scene, the play’s director, Tyne Rafaeli, said by phone, Stacey has “a newfound awareness of the hypocrisy of her life,” as well as of “the lies that her network, her studio, her bosses, her TV producers are asking her to deliver to her community. And she, in the moment, decides not to deliver those lies.”
She opts instead to warn her audience of the imminence of a danger whose escalation she has smoothed over for years. As Stacey says, she is meant to be a “happy voice” in her viewers’ mornings, reassuring them that “it’s all gonna be all right.”
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The post How a Chaotic ‘Network’-Style Outburst Plays Out in ‘Weather Girl’ appeared first on New York Times.
