‘Hurricane Diane’

Director’s Statement

My freshman year, a certain professor told me that at its core, once you strip away all of the glorious spectacle of set, costume, lights, and sound, THEATRE is about the connection of ACTORS to an AUDIENCE through a TEXT. What’s particularly nice about a staged reading is that it allows you to analyze a text and strip it down to those three elements: itself, the actors performing it, and yourself. As audience members, we often forget that our own reactions and interpretations are a part of the show too. 

Hurricane Diane is an incredible play because it is an intersection of so many important issues that deserve to be constantly discussed. In today’s age, art, especially theatre, is in a unique position of needing to evoke universality and answer the question, “Why this show now?” Hurricane Diane answers this question with the same confidence as Diane herself: because humanity seems to desire our own fall from grace. We destroy our planet heedlessly and we despite each other for silly reasons such as what kind of person another person loves. We crave to be saved from ourselves while doing nothing to invoke our own salvation. 

Last semester, I did a personal deep dive into Aristotle’s concept of dramatic action. This is a single sentence that encapsulates every single individual aspect of a whole show. The one I’ve settled on for Hurricane Diane is: 

Not even God can save us now.

- Bristol Barnes