The Dark Heart of Meteorology

Written by: Stephen Aubrey
Directed by: Jess Chayes

Franklin Elijah White is traveling across the country on an increasingly quixotic and personal journey. Aided only by a slide projector and assorted meteorological equipment, he has a simple message: The weather is going to kill us all. Every single one of us.
Amid concerns about global warming and an uncertain future, The Assembly presents a one-man show about natural disasters, large and small. The Dark Heart of Meteorology, created by The Assembly, is a series of barely-multimedia presentations—part lecture/slideshow, part happening—by lonely traveling weatherman Franklin Elijah White. Featuring a tour-de-force performance by performer Richard Lovejoy, The Dark Heart of Meteorology combines live performance, video, and the lost art of the slideshow to investigate the tensions between chaos and control and the intersection of the personal and the meteorological.

The creative team for The Dark Heart of Meteorology will include Edward Bauer (Dramaturgy), Nick Benacerraf (Scenic Design), Stacy Boggs (Lighting Design), Alex Koch (Video Design), and Asa Wember (Sound Design).

The Assembly Theater Company (formerly The American Story Project) is a New York based ensemble of multi-disciplinary artists formed by five Wesleyan University graduates. Assembly members seek to unite varied interests in service of creating wide reaching, unabashedly theatrical and rigorously researched ensemble performances that address the complexities of our ever-changing world. They embrace collaboration as the core of the creative process, developing all the elements of text, action, and design side-by-side within the rehearsal environment. The Assembly’s plays have been performed in Connecticut and Edinburgh (where they were nominated for the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival Fringe First Award) as well as in multiple venues throughout New York City: The Ontological Theater, The Brick Theater, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Abingdon Theater Complex and The Flea.

“The Assembly theater ensemble have complete faith in every aspect of their wacked-out concept—their comedy stems from the organic merger of the bizarre elements on stage, not self-conscious jokes about the anachronism of it all.” Eli Epstein-Deutsch, The Village Voice (Clementine and the Cyber Ducks)