Stacey is the perfect fit for her role as the weather girl at the American television station in Fresno California which wants to relax its viewers rather than worry them with unnecessary updates on the weather gloom. Stacey looks and sounds the part with her broad, warm smile, long blonde hair and tight-fitting pink skirt and top.
They are so impressed with her look and reassuring delivery of weather news that they want to promote her to a role in Phoenix.
Never mind there are growing numbers of wildfires in Fresno, and the show opens with Stacey standing outside early in the morning watching someone’s house burn down killing an entire family including three children who had failed to follow public advice to evacuate. Not that the station wants to make anything of that. It might turn people off.
It’s not the only thing on Stacey's mind that the station isn’t paying attention to. Even early that morning, a tall travel cup of Prosecco fuels Stacey, and we soon gather she is an alcoholic with a homeless mother and a scatty social life.
Something of that odd lifestyle takes place later that day. She responds to the news of her promotion to Phoenix, which she regards as an actual desert worse than semi-arid Fresno, by saying to her boss, “fuck off Jerry”. Everyone seems to regard that as part of the celebration. After work, she heads off to meet up with her date, whose name she has forgotten.
Since he’s a tech with three cars and lots of money, she calls him Mark. He tells her he’s planning to build 600 extra homes in the area. In response to her question about where the water for the people who live in them will come from, he says that’s not his problem.
When he suggests they “do it” on one of the cars, she asks to drive it somewhere, and while driving, asks him if it is okay to wreck it.
Julia McDermott gives a revetting, entertaining performance as Stacey, mostly telling us her story as it happens, sometimes sounding as if she is instantly speaking to herself. The monologue is almost always amusing. There is barely a person in the theatre who isn’t smiling at her adventures for the full sixty minutes running time.
Stacey’s strange, disturbing, often improbable journey with its touches of hippie magical mysticism takes place in tandem with the fires spreading across the area, which the television station doesn’t want to worry its viewers about. Frustrated at the mounting evidence of the lethal impact of the fires being ignored, she says she would like to pour gasoline over herself and set herself on fire. It’s an angry thought she doesn't carry out.
If it wasn’t for the amusing tilt of our narrator, this show could easily have been simply an unnerving dystopian warning about institutional complacency in response to climate change.