Review: Weer Opens A24’s New Cherry Lane Theatre with ‘90s Romcom Pandemonium

A24—the indie film company that captured prestige audiences with Oscar winners Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once—is threading a fine needle as the new landlord of the West Village’s Cherry Lane Theatre. Even with its reputation as a haven for high-level creativity on a mid-range budget, it’s still a corporation that’s acquired a historic off-Broadway institution, added a sleek concession stand, and built an adjoining supper club from the chefs that brought the Upper East Side the refined French bistro Le Veau d’Or.

With that in mind, as an opening salvo, A24 couldn’t have made a smarter move than Weer, comedian Natalie Palamides’s one-person, split-personality clown show of chaos. Forget the refined housewarming party. Palamides is throwing a kegger with no intention of sparing the fine furnishings while mom and dad sit just upstairs wearing their “cool parent” sweatshirts. Because if you need an antidote to the self-seriousness that comes with the collision between downtown theater and indie film, recruit the performer who couldn’t muster an ounce of embarrassment if Eve had inhaled an entire apple orchard.

Palamides comes to New York as a darling of Edinburgh Fringe, having won Best Newcomer in 2017 with her show Nate (which went on to have a life on Netflix) and gaining buzz in 2024 with Weer. While the former had her cosplaying as a mustachioed bro emotionally wrestling with his masculinity, Weer splits her down the middle and has her physically wrestling (among other things) with herself.

Her right half is a Nate-adjacent man named Mark and her left half is his on-again-off-again girlfriend Christina, together dressed in designer Ashley Dudek’s Frankensteined costume pieces. Mark is styled like an unkempt Cory Matthews. Christina has clearly watched too many Britney Spears music videos. Did I mention it’s the ‘90s?

We meet our lovers in the middle of a break-up fight at a Y2K New Years Eve party where “they” make their entrance grappling. It’s a perfect opportunity for Palamides to throw a full red solo cup into the crowd—one of many applications of the audience splash zone, the borders of which are hazy at best. From there, we have a melodramatic car crash featuring the deer on the program’s cover (if you notice that “deer” rhymes with “weer” you’ve cracked the code of the title), followed by a flashback to 1996, the start of Mark and Christina’s ill-fated romance told in the style of every ‘90s romcom.

Palamides’ sendup of the cinema that ruined millennial women is great comedy, but from the start, her singular mission is bedlam. Much like the volume of Mark’s stereo when he’s imposing his favorite Pearl Jam song on Christina, the volume starts at 10 and just keeps getting louder. That means classic clowning that leaves our auteur covered in the various liquids planted around the stage (Gabriel Evansohn is responsible for the cacophonous scenic design with props by Lucas A. Degirolamo); sex scenes that escalate beyond what you think a solo actor is capable of miming; and degrees of audience participation that could only be managed by an expert in improv.

At times, it also means overlong sequences that beat a dead…deer. But Palamides, whipping left and right, throwing her body toward the next limit, and covered in more substances than the star of a Jamie Lloyd production, never shows signs of fatigue or hesitation. There’s no bit too extreme, no stage business too mortifying. That kind of commitment breeds great entertainment while also becoming its own spectacle—a superhuman feat of conquering the ego that you can’t help but observe with a little bit of awe. Weer is a show that gives you absolutely nothing to think about, and still, it’s a performance you’ll never forget.