Like any good tale of revenge and retribution, there’s a full dramatic arc to the story of how the subversive Atlanta-based theatre company Vernal & Sere came to bring an original work, Hurricane Season, to New York City’s Theatre Row this summer (Aug. 23-Sept. 7).
It began a decade ago with a different show, when artistic and now married real-life partners Sawyer Estes and Erin Boswell had just graduated from college and were trying their hand at the Off-Broadway scene. Estes recalls with chagrin his attempt to bring to the stage a work he’d written: a history of his small-town Texas oil family he described as “Ionesco does There Will Be Blood.”
As fascinating as that sounds on paper, the result “was god-awful,” Estes admitted. The experience was humbling, and it made clear that a lack of funding, time, and resources, not to mention a mismatch on the creative team, could truly make or break a project.
Following their ill-fated adventures in New York City, Estes and Boswell moved to Atlanta, touching down in August 2015. Boswell was set on plugging into the exploding film scene in Georgia.
Within that first year as transplants, their paths converged with three kindred spirits who became the rest of the five co-founding members of Vernal & Sere: movement director and actor Erin O’Connor, who responded to Boswell’s post about needing a roommate on a popular local Facebook group; lighting designer and actor Lindsey Sharpless, who met Boswell on a tour of the Walking Dead set in Senoia, Ga.; and Kathrine Barnes, who linked up with everyone through mutual artistic friends.
They launched their nascent theatre group with the aim to challenge “didactic, argumentative work,” instead striving to put “people between polarities in this kind of very difficult gray, in the ambiguous state, and to not decide for them.” Heavily inspired by absurdism, the company’s name comes from a quote by Samuel Beckett—a phrase that roughly means “between the sacred and profane.”
“We were all just hungry for this thing that felt dangerous and titillating in a way that doesn’t happen for me with most theatre,” said O’Connor. “You want to be disarmed. When people talk about theatre being a dying art, it’s because that quality can be missing so often.”
Mission accomplished so far: Over the last 10 years, Vernal & Sere has staged some of the city’s most ambitious, intense, imaginative, and otherworldly productions, including Mickle Maher’s Spirits to Enforce, Young Jean Lee’s Lear, and a reimagining of the riot-inducing 19th-century play Ubu Roi by the scandalous, proto-punk-rock French playwright Alfred Jarry.
They’ve also tackled challenges like the late British playwright Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis, which has no delineated characters or stage directions, and avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s darkly funny social satire The Exterminating Angel, translated from screen to stage. This past year, for the company’s 10th production, they gave Atlanta audiences Estes’s interpretation of Anne Carson’s poem The Glass Essay, verbatim, through a series of interweaving vignettes.
Their work has incorporated a variety of movement languages and formal styles, drawing from more experimental, boundary-pushing approaches more commonly found across Europe. Estes and Boswell recall how excited they were by German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet at BAM in 2022, in which he had the melancholy Danish prince literally eating dirt. (As the New York Times review put it: This was Shakespeare’s protagonist “unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.”)
Boswell puts this approach in more practical terms too: “Theatre has got to give you something that Netflix can’t, otherwise, you’re going to stay home and watch Netflix.”
Fast forward almost a decade later, and Boswell and Estes are making their return to New York, armed with years of experience running their bold, independent theatre company in Georgia. Okay, so theirs may not be a full-out mission for revenge, but it is definitely a long-awaited chance at a do-over for the duo.
Written and directed by Estes and starring Boswell in a key role, Hurricane Season follows an unhappily married couple through chance encounters and extramarital affairs with each other’s doppelgangers. Artistic and literary influences include Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. Expect some of Vernal & Sere’s patented surreal, surprising elements.
Starting with this show, the company plans to pilot a working model where they incubate new works in Atlanta, then take them on the road for more time to breathe and expand. Hurricane Season, originally staged at Atlanta’s Windmill Arts Center in 2022, will feature much of the same creative team from the original production, but they’ll be revising the set design and rethinking some of the staging.
And yes, the Vernal & Sere team recognizes that their work often gets described as “weird,” especially in comparison with what else is being offered on stages across the U.S. But they’re quick to point out that there’s lots of mainstream popular material out there that’s also deeply strange: Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Game of Thrones, even Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
Vernal & Sere board member Kacie Willis noted that the niche following they’ve built over the last 10 years in fact gravitates toward the predictable unpredictability of their work.
“The company has galvanized an audience of folks who never read the show descriptions and never know what they’re going into, and that’s kind of part of the appeal,” she said. “It’s like the A24 of theahttps://a24films.com/tres. I never watch the trailer, but I’ll be like, ‘This is going to be something I’ve never seen before. This is going to be something that takes some turns. Let’s go on this adventure today.’”
Alexis Hauk (she/her) is an Atlanta-based writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Bitter Southerner, Time, Mental Floss, Washington City Paper, ArtsATL, and more.
