Review: Sunny With a Chance of Apocalypse in Weather Girl at St. Ann’s Warehouse

How strange it must be to be a weather forecaster these days, cheerily delivering reports on rain and sun and snow without allusion to the underlying reality of a climate crisis that predicting the daily temperature does nothing to address.

“I can’t hold this smile much longer and the flames are melting my makeup,” confesses the ever-chipper Stacey (Julia McDermott), the magnetic sole character in Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl, now running at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn. She’s on-air in California where the impending sense of unavoidable environmental disaster—presented here as an eerie dystopia that’s also fully descriptive of our real world—rarely yields a mention in her coverage.

The climate crisis isn’t the only thing Stacey’s colleagues seem to ignore. She fills her giant coffee mug with prosecco daily. “They must smell it,” she says blithely, “but no one’s speaking up.”

And for much of Weather Girl’s riveting 65 minutes, Stacey is a protagonist in the tradition of Beef or Fleabag, a woman embracing her id. (Weather Girl and Fleabag share a producer.) When she’s offered a promotion to relocate to an even drier city, Stacey contemplates murdering her bosses, then curses them out and flees the office. On a romantic drive with a man whose home boasts “a total absence of printed material,” she follows the sudden urge to grab the wheel and total his car.

Why act normal, Watkins seems to ask, when the earth is burning? If we’re keeping calm and carrying on, aren’t we all just bystander weather forecasters ourselves, grinning through a climate apocalypse we can all see coming?

As Stacey taps into her darker impulses, it’s clear that Watkins, also McDermott’s partner in real life, has custom-fit this role to the performer. McDermott glides through her vocal range, trading Valley Girl chirps for guttural groans as she begins to take on the suffering of the dry earth beneath her feet.

Weather Girl eventually turns a strange corner: Stacey reunites with her long-missing mother, who is homeless and supposedly unhinged, in a subplot saturated with magical realism. McDermott sensitively navigates the shift toward a gentler tone and slower pace, but the metaphors are hazier here than with the razor-sharp depiction of Stacey’s revolt against corporate media’s indifference toward the end of the world.

Watkins is an assured monologist, infusing Stacey’s speech with playful personality that still leaves room for surprising poetry. Recognizing her core spiritual unease as an inheritance, Stacey sees her mother as “this woman that I don’t know but I’m absolutely from.”

And Tyne Rafaeli (Becoming Eve) keeps the play taut and suspenseful in her staging, interjecting Isabella Byrd’s light cues and Kieran Lucas’s startling sound effects into transitions that function less as jump-cuts than as jump-scares. Weather Girl’s uncanniness extends to the green-screen background and large televisions onstage that remain blank for the show’s duration: for a little over an hour, at least, we won’t be distracted by pretty pictures.

It’s refreshing to see a piece of theater that’s both dramatically exhilarating and civically profound without ever tipping toward sanctimony. A weather girl with a drinking problem turns out to be the best messenger for Watkins’s urgent warnings. “The world is indifferent to our explanations,” Stacey realizes by the play’s conclusion. “It never asked for a forecast.”

But the forecast for political theater from this particular playwright-performer power couple? Sunny all the way.