Theater Review: 'Hurricane Season'

Over the coming weeks, the is presenting its Eighth Annual Hurricane Season, a collection of never-before-produced plays at its venue on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The new plays run over the course of three weekends, with different plays each week; the fourth and final weekend will re-stage the best of the previous weeks, as each audience votes for the best play, playwright, director, actor and actress.

The festival kicked off Friday evening with three plays: Sex and Money and Money and Sex, Rollercoaster of Love, and Things That Go Hump in the Night. The common theme is sex, humorously handled.

Sex and Money and Money and Sex is set in the sitting room of a pair of quarreling lovers, Clara (Tiffany Cole) and Martin (Trent Walker.) Like Schnitzler's La Ronde, or David Hare's 1998 riff on it, The Blue Room, the clever scripting (by playwright Jack Karp) shows the cyclical nature of human sexual relations. The play illuminates the instability of meaning and the havoc that it can wreak on human interactions; as the couple separately opine, "It's not what you say but how you say it."

Rollercoaster of Love relies on the considerable comedic talents of its two actors, Niki Blumberg and Mason Hallberg, who play a man and woman navigating the beginning, middle and denouement of a relationship. If Sex and Money is about the slippery nature of language—it's not what you say but how you say it—then Rollercoaster is about the similar treacheries of representation, as the two characters openly discuss the illusions of stagecraft and the elements of story telling.

The trio is completed by Things That Go Hump in the Night, where a single mother struggles to achieve peace between her boyfriend and her teenage daughter, Megan (Meghan McConnell.) Bert Emmett excels in his role as an unwilling father figure, exuding deer-in-the-headlights at every awkward moment.

These three plays will run through Monday 17, before being replaced by the next batch: Damien, Stalking Pollyanna, and Holey Smokes.

The Eighth Annual Hurricane Season, The Eclectic Company Theatre, July 15–August 7. For showtimes and information on upcoming plays, click here.