Since it premiered Off-Broadway in 2019, my play Hurricane Diane has had a number of regional productions, and in three of them, including the production currently at People’s Light in Pennsylvania, the virtuosic actor Rami Margron has played the lead role of Diane. The part is unusual: Diane is the god Dionysus, who’s been living incognito in the form of a lesbian landscape gardener in Vermont, and who’s now coming out of retirement to try to restart the Dionysian mystery cult in a last-ditch attempt to save the world from climate catastrophe. The play is a comedy about serious things.
Rami played Diane at the Old Globe in San Diego in early 2020, until the theatre was forced to shut its doors the night before the show was to close. Then they played Diane at the Huntington in Boston in 2021, in the first show to go up on that stage after the post-lockdown reopening. Now they’re playing Diane again at People’s Light. Over these four eventful years, queer and trans rights have only grown more imperiled—and the world has only gotten hotter.
I asked Rami if they would talk to me about their journey with the role, the play, and the issues it grapples with. Here’s our conversation.
MADELEINE GEORGE: I guess my first question is, how does it feel to be typecast as a god
RAMI MARGRON: [Laughs] I have played a few gods. It’s a little like being an actor on steroids. If you’re a performer, you have that little spark of magic that makes you watchable, right? When you play a god, it’s like, how do you tap into that part of yourself and turn it way up, and let that be okay? For one thing, gods tend to be really confident, so it’s about finding ways to boost my confidence—finding ways to vibrate with a bigger energy. I sometimes end up using my spiritual practice, honestly, to increase the energy I’m resonating at. I can’t think of another way to put it. It’s like nondenominational praying: calling in all of my various ancestors and guides, tapping into the earth, visualizing my roots going down into the earth and branches reaching out in all directions. Sometimes I call on my dad and ask him to come along for the ride—he’s dead, I should say. I also spend as much time in nature as I can, because being barefoot in nature taps me into that energy really quick. Also doing, like, jumping jacks. Pushups. Burpees.
It also really helps that the other characters in the show endow me with that divine power. It’s like in stage combat, when the person getting hit has to make it look real—these actors I’m working with at People’s Light, they’re so wonderful, and they endow me with all this charisma just by how they react to me.
Can we talk about gender? The god Dionysus is male and yet also famously a shapeshifter, and in this play Diane uses she/her pronouns but is masculine. One of the jokes I was thinking of when I was first writing the play is that in my version of the Bacchae story, the god has been in hiding, trying to blend in, and so has chosen the most invisible form they can think of: a butch dyke who deals in compost and permaculture. Like, how can you be most overlooked in public space? Be a butch lesbian—people will just see right through you. But there’s not a lot to build on with that joke, and obviously gods are about way more than that. Different actors have brought all different kinds of gender expression to the role—it’s been played by transmasculine actors and nonbinary actors, and, in one case, a cis female actor who was visibly pregnant at the time of the show. I wonder where gender sits for you in terms of playing Diane.
My brain just went in five different directions—where do I start? I identify as genderqueer and gender-fluid, but my particular brand of nonbinary identity is that I feel like many different things at once. For me, “nonbinary” is about being multitudinous, and playing a god is a way to express a type of multitudinousness.
So much of my professional acting career has been spent playing male roles who have swagger. I perform in various Haitian dance companies, and when you do that, you often embody different gods. I often get to play one that’s very similar to this role. He’s called Papa Gede, and he’s a trickster—a sexy bad boy who wears purple. Basically he’s Prince, in a different form. I’m very drawn to exploring whatever the hell that kind of gender expression is. I’ve played Duke Orsino twice. I’ve played the Rover, Oberon, Zeus. The Bastard in King John. I played Vershinin in your incredible translation of Three Sisters. These dudes all have that swagger. Whatever that is, that sex god energy, I feel very connected to that—there’s something in me that continues to want to go there. And I feel that in this part.
Have you felt that the character’s gender has been different in all three productions?
I think I’m getting softer each time I do it. The first production I did at the Old Globe was pretty old school; I took a kind of stone butch approach to Diane. And then the production I did right after the pandemic at the Huntington—first of all, the costume designer, Hahnji Jang, was younger. They’re an amazing trans artist and activist, and they brought a contemporary awareness to their design and taught me a lot. And then society keeps shifting. It’s only been a few years, but trans culture has shifted so much. There’s so much more room for fluidity.
In terms of queerness, it’s been very important to me that the divine presence at the center of this story about human beings and the more-than-human world is queer. I was talking about this to a botanist and she said, “Well, of course, because plants are so queer—most of them have both male and female organs, and they reproduce using, like, insects and wind.” Does that resonate with you? What does the queerness of the play mean to you?
Of course Dionysus is essentially queer, between the cross-dressing and same-sex relationships and general deviation from patriarchal structure and the laws of society. Becca Krauss, the wardrobe manager of the production I’m doing now, was talking to me about this, and they pointed out that for queer people, caring for and nurturing plants can be a healing gesture, a way of taking care of the world that didn’t necessarily nurture or take care of us. There’s a parallel between the way the queer community as a whole thrives and spreads joy in adverse conditions and the way plants find ways to survive and spread, even in rocky soil or shifting climate conditions.
There’s also just the fundamental act of creativity. The energy of creativity is the same as the energy of growing plants, and that energy is sort of an opposite force to the power of societal structures, patriarchal structures. The thing that scares the patriarchy more than anything is not being able to control the wildness and unpredictability of how nature’s going to grow, and the wildness and unpredictability of our bodies, souls, and hearts if we allow ourselves to deviate from the rules.
Speaking of unpredictability, can you talk a little bit about what it was like to bracket the pandemic with two different productions of this play? You were in a production at the Old Globe in San Diego right before the lockdown, and then you were in a production at the Huntington in Boston that was the first play to open there after the lockdown ended.
Coming back to do the play again in Boston was especially meaningful to me, because I tore my meniscus during the run in San Diego and had to leave the show right before closing weekend. It was so hard. In a way, I’ve gotten used to it now, because I’ve had Covid and had to miss shows. But even now it’s absolutely heartbreaking to work on a role and feel that it is you and you’re so connected to it, and then not be able to do the performance.
So you closed out that show a little early, and then the show closed, and then the world closed.
Yes. So getting a redo was especially meaningful. And I loved that this was the first show to open in Boston after the lockdown, and everyone who was so starved for theatre had to come out and see a lesbian play about climate change! But people were hungry for it. The opening line of the play is, “I have returned, and it begins.” When I said that at that first performance after lockdown, it brought the house down.
I think of you as such a shapeshifter as a performer. You work in so many different modalities, and whenever I think of you, it’s in motion. What is it like for you to return to the same script over and over again? Do you feel like you’re coming back to the same questions, or does it feel like a you-can’t-step-in-the-same-river-twice kind of situation?
The first two productions I did were very different from each other. The directors were very different, the whole style of the play was different, the conclusions the play drew at the end were different. The first production at the Old Globe had a bit of camp to it. I was pretty proclamation-y and bombastic at the top, in a full classical Dionysian outfit, like a purple satin toga with a thyrsus and a long train that went all the way offstage, out of the audience’s sight. There was a magic moment where I slammed down the thyrsus and the grapes that were all over it flew off and it turned into a shovel, and then my entire toga flew off and I was revealed in classic, old-school butch lesbian garb. It was amazing. Just very big, broad strokes, in a wonderful way. The Bacchae in that production had campy choreography, and then when they came back as the chorus in the epilogue, they were like, a chick folk-rock band. At the very end, they flew in this giant tree, which landed in the center of the kitchen island. The roots took over the whole playing space and it was the only thing left in the world—no humans, just this massive tree. Nature everywhere. By the way, when the lockdown happened, that set stayed exactly like that for months—isn’t it amazing to picture that giant tree standing there alone in that empty theatre?
In the second production, there was almost nothing from the natural world visible onstage, and the ending was much more stark. I was directed in a more naturalistic way. This third production feels different again. In the first production, I was working with a kind of preternatural stillness. In this version, the director has me leaning into an impish, Puck-like energy, as well as more general humanness.
Like many actors, I’m still making discoveries closing weekend: I’m like, “Oh, that’s what that means. The end.” So it’s really exciting to get multiple chances at a role like this, with different collaborators who can bring different things out of it.
My last question is about audiences and climate. In the five years I worked on this play, from 2014 to 2019, things changed so much—audiences needed much less hand-holding to get on board with a story about climate change. Now five more years, and 50,000 more catastrophes, have passed, and I wonder if you feel another shift. Can audiences still find the play funny at this point? I guess you’ll find out…
This time I’m doing the play not actually in New Jersey, but very close by, in a similar suburban town. And everyone in the rehearsal room who’s from this area really felt that they recognized the characters. Those folks are going to be our audience too, so hopefully they will laugh, and enjoy seeing these larger-than-life versions of themselves in this epic-slash-familiar world.
Madeleine George (she/her) is the writer of plays including The Sore Loser, Hurricane Diane (Obie Award), The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, and Precious Little. Her honors include a Lilly Award, the Hermitage Major Theater Award, and a Whiting Award for Drama, as well as Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations for four seasons as a writer/producer on the Hulu mystery-comedy Only Murders in the Building.
