Drama Desk-nominated director Tyne Rafaeli brings the multi-award-winning “Weather Girl” to Soho Theatre, following its triumphant run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024.
This blistering dark comedy by Brian Watkins, creator of Amazon’s “Outer Range,” offers a dizzying exploration of climate crisis and American culture.Starring Off-Broadway sensation Julia McDermott, “Weather Girl” takes audiences on a rollercoaster ride through the psyche of a California weather presenter, blending humor with urgent environmental themes.
The production, which garnered multiple awards at Edinburgh, promises a tour-de-force performance and innovative staging. Catch “Weather Girl” at Soho Theatre from 5 March to 5 April 2025, with press night on 11 March. Tickets are available now at www.sohotheatre.com.
You’re bringing “Weather Girl” to Soho Theatre – what can you tell us about the show?
Weather Girl is a dark comedy about a California weather girl who while reporting on the changing climate day-after-day careens towards an existential crisis about the destruction of the planet and our collective apathy. It is a run-away-train of a play that plunges you into the heart of American strangeness – it will make you howl with laughter and spit you out the other end with a new relationship to the world around us.
How does this production explore the themes of climate crisis and media representation?
I think the climate crisis and how it is discussed in our media is a hugely complex and multifaceted conversation – and changes daily. Weather Girl never set out to claim it has answers, but only to point to some of the burning questions we are facing, and to ask them in the most human, fallible and self-effacing way.
The play focuses on one weather girl in Fresno, California who wakes up to the hypocrisy and artificiality of the world around her and the corrosive effect that is having on both the people in her life and the land she lives on. It plunges a needle into our collective denial that is catalysed and compounded by the media we consume. But on an even deeper level this play cracks open our anthropocentrism – our belief that we as humans are the most important beings on the planet – it encourages us to begin to rethink our relationship to the natural world.
Can you share insights into your collaboration with playwright Brian Watkins and actor Julia McDermott?
Brian, Julia and I developed this show from the seed of an idea to the play that it became. Brian and I had a long shared desire to make an intimate piece of theatre that tackles the epic. He and I have talked for many years about our shared horror of the increasing intellectual, spiritual and cultural apathy we saw around us.
He and I also share an appetite for both the sublime and the profane, and so there was no way that what we made wouldn’t also be deeply funny and self-effacing. We also wanted to prioritize working outside of an institutional theatre to intentionally shake up our process and create a bold theatrical invitation.
And thus I approached Francesca Moody, whom I have known for 15 years, who I had a sense would be the perfect producer for the show. I have been working with Julia McDermott since her days at the Juilliard School, and she is an insatiable artist with a deep thirst for the epic, the ridiculous and the theatrical and is not afraid of going to the messiest and wildest places of human experiences.
Our 3-way collaboration on this piece was so organic and involved it is honestly hard to pinpoint where one of our contributions begins and where it ends. It was truly talmudic, a process of continually asking questions and searching for the boldest truth. None of us are interested in theatre that simplifies or offers easy, condescending answers. We are interested in presenting the gordian knot of what it is to be alive.
What challenges did you face in directing a one-person show that tackles such intense themes?
My job on this project, amongst many other things, is to take the audience from what is very funny, through the metaphysical, and then deliver them to the existential. These tonal shifts need to be imperceptible, so that you pull the audience towards a sobering truth without them even noticing. I also had to create an arena in which Julia had an immediate and unimpeded relationship with the audience, while also building a theatricality that evoked Stacey’s world and the many different environments she travels to. There is a forensic precision needed when you only have one person in the space, and also Stacey goes to extremely feral and wild places. So the balancing of that – the intimate and the epic – through the text, performance and design – that is my job and the essential tension at the centre of the production.
How does the design of the show, particularly Isabella Byrd’s lighting, enhance the storytelling?
From the earliest draft that I read, I knew that we didn’t want a traditional “set”, and the design would not want to be in any way literal. We want to land the juxtaposition between the extreme artifice of Stacey’s external life and the extreme depth of her internal life. Isabella Byrd is an extraordinary poet and painter with lights, and I wanted her work to lead the physical design of the production. She has been able to create a design that can travel from the quotidian to the operatic without ever taking our eyes off Stacey.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see “Weather Girl”
Strap in! This is a run-away-train of a play that will take you from the very absurd, through the fire of the surreal, to the stark reality of the extremely real crisis that we are living through and must look squarely in the eye. I truly wish that this play didn’t keep getting more relevant but tragically it is. Step onto our rollercoaster and come with us on a trip through American strangeness and its crazed grip on the world as we know it.
