Therese Plaehn as Julia (left) and Richard Thieriot as Danny in Lizzie Vieh’s Monsoon Season.
Lizzie Vieh’s Monsoon Season is being promoted as a “demented romantic comedy,” and it certainly is that—and more. After two years of development at All for One Theater, where Vieh is an artist in residence, and a recent world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Monsoon Season is a strange, funny, and haunting piece, which depicts, with wit and pathos, two lives careening out of control, and yet never takes a condescending or mocking attitude toward its characters.
Danny (Richard Thieriot), who works at a technical-support call center for a telecom company in Phoenix and doubles as an Uber driver, and Julia (Therese Plaehn), a makeup artist who runs a YouTube tutorial called Pretty as Fuck, are recently separated and on the road to divorce. The play is structured in two parts, both monologues: the first is Danny’s story, the second Julia’s; except for the transition between the parts and the ending, they don’t share the stage.
Danny begins to come unglued. Photographs by Maria Baranova.
Both characters have a direct-address portion of their monologues and then mostly quick scenes with other characters who are not present on stage, including their young daughter Sammy. Somehow this is all accomplished clearly and seamlessly, relying not only on the strength of Vieh’s writing and Thieriot’s and Plaehn’s stellar performances, but on Kristin McCarthy Parker’s crisp and unobtrusive direction along with Sarah Johnston’s bravura lighting design.
Danny, living in a curtainless apartment with a view of the glowing neon sign of Peaches strip club, is with every passing scene becoming more beaten down and desperate. Even good deeds, such as rescuing a hermit crab as a pet for his daughter, backfire—the crab never emerges from its shell and only reminds Sammy that a cat or dog would have been the better choice. He longs for human connection, and the play repeatedly shows his attempts rebuffed: on work phone calls, by Uber passengers, by his mother who mistakes him for his brother who never visits, by the women at Peaches.
Danny sinks into the depths of the pathetic, hovering outside his old house at night, where his wife lives with her new boyfriend, and cutting holes in the screen door. Getting permanently expelled from Peaches might be the nadir of his sometimes cringeworthy journey. Thieriot captures Danny’s frailty and anger behind the veneer of forced cheer. His humiliations generate laughter, but an anxious kind—this is not satire, and Danny is never less than fully human.
Julia filming her YouTube show.
Julia claims to feel liberated post-separation and tries to recapture her youth by cruising the local bar (where she met Danny). She has an Adderall habit that gets much worse when she shacks up with handyman/drug dealer Shane. Shane becomes abusive, and Julia spirals into deep addiction and outright delirium. Plaehn unflinchingly portrays Julia’s vanity and delusions without turning her into a caricature.
The play is not only about the particular dysfunctions or neuroses of its two protagonists, but also the precariousness of life in the American lower-middle class. Any setback can thrust one from subsistence into desperation. Enduring humiliations is not merely due to personal failings but structural ones.
The play’s title refers to a weather phenomenon in Arizona; after a “thunk” is heard, Danny explains to a colleague, “It’s just a bird. It’s a glass building—they fly into it all the time. Especially during monsoon season. Heat lightning, electrical storms—they go berserk.” The bird imagery, especially after Sammy sees a television program on the carrion-eating marabou stork, becomes more prevalent as the tension builds toward a violent conclusion. Vieh mixes realism and the surreal to achieve a tone that is brutal yet humorous, twisted yet moving.
Monsoon Season runs through Nov. 23 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (224 Waverly Place). Evening performances are 8 p.m. on Thursday through Saturday; matinees are 3 p.m. on Sunday. For tickets, visit afo.nyc/monsoonseason.
