HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George At The Hartford Stage

 

Review by Andy Hoffman

HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George At The Hartford Stage June 5-29, 2025 Directed by Zoe Golub-Sass

 The Hartford Stage closes out its 2024-25 season with a rousing production of HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George. A comic take on Greek tragedy, the play has Dionysus returning to claim a rightful place among humans and stop the degradation of the Earth — starting with a cul-de-sac in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood. The demi-god appears as Diana, a landscaper promising to return the neat, manicured lawn of suburbia into permaculture forest, a state of natural equilibrium. Dionysus, god of wine, agriculture, theater, and insanity, prefers a world with as few controls as possible, a place that celebrates the rioting soul of both nature and human beings — especially women. The four identical houses on this cul-de-sac hold four very different women out of whom Diane plans to create her first acolytes and from there reestablish the Dionysian cult. Among the four, Diane first picks Carol, played coolly by Katya Campbell, in whom she senses a deep loneliness. 

Unfortunately, though, Carol treasures her suburban ideal of pristine lawn and curb appeal as the only defense against the wild disappointments of life. She dreams of an elaborate wrought-iron bench as the centerpiece of her blessedly restrained garden. Diana, repulsed both spiritually and physically, realizes she has chosen her first convert badly and turns her attention to Beth, whose husband sucked her dry and then left her in this emotional desert. The seduction is almost immediate, freeing Diane to shift her focus first to Renee, a former lesbian who already believes in permaculture, and then to Pam, an Italian housewife who has becomes the emotional center of this corner of the world. 

\The all-female cast – Christina DeCicco as Pam, Sharina Martin as Renee, and Alyse Alan Lewis as Beth – push the story forward with visible energy – holding the spotlight for Bernadette Sefic’s Diane. Between the sequential seductions, the women gather to tell stories and assess their lives. Like most of HURRICANE DIANE, these exchanges provide nonstop laughs, from the good-natured ribbing about Renee’s too-often told stories of her wild past to the more serious question of how much sex is normal. Madeleine George has a gift for humor; she’s a writer and executive story editor on the Steve Martin vehicle on Hulu, the award-winning ONLY MURDERS IN THIS BUILDING. The Hartford Stage brought in Zoe Golub-Sass to magnify the laughs. This production finds the extraordinary balance between humor and cataclysm. As Diane says in her opening monologue, “It’s 11:45. If I don’t step in now, the glaciers are gonna melt the permafrost is gonna thaw and fast-forward a hundred years and there won’t be a single human left on the planet to worship me!”

 HURRICANE DIANE blends the bawdy and existential threat into a shining example of ‘a spoonful of sugar’ to help the medicine go down, a call to action wrapped in myth and hi-jinks. Almost every aspect