I love storms. I write about them sometimes, and recently I’ve been reading the innumerable horror stories of Rudyard Kipling*, whose loud, hot, ceaseless summer storms are as terrifying as ghosts.

Weather makes for fine and often surprising metaphor. Rain isn’t always sad**, and even being struck by lightning, as in Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, isn’t always horrible, or its horror—the pain and scarring—has the potential (forgive my electrical pun) to make its victim all the more human.

My friend Stephen Aubrey (who edited Suspicious Anatomy) delves not only into what the weather can mean but also into the dangers of its interpretation in his acclaimed Dark Heart of Meteorology, which is soon going up for two more nights in New York.

If you haven’t seen Dark Heart, you should. And even if you caught the last run, I am assured by Mr. Aubrey that his play is now 50% different and 100% better***.

The relevant deetz:

June 21 & 28 • 8 p.m. • $10
Workshop Mainstage Theater • 312 W. 36th St. • 4th floor
Email assembly.theater@gmail.com for reservations

Directed by Jess Chayes • starring Richard Lovejoy
Produced by The Assembly**** & Theater of the Expendable

A précis:

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… Featuring a tour-de-force performance by Richard Lovejoy, The Dark Heart of Meteorology investigates the tensions between chaos and control and the intersection of the personal and the meteorological. [The Author adds—and the intersection of the romantic-ideal and the romantic-actual. Like the weather, love changes unpredictably and can set tall trees on fire...]

The show’s postcard, drawn by Suspicious Anatomy cocreator Ethan Gould:

Addenda:

*A storm of a different type hangs perpetually over Kipling’s oeuvre. But to hound the long-dead reporter for his Victorian chauvinism and occasional lack of spiritual generosity is only to miss out on so many truly lovely, harshly insightful stories—stories of spectral horses, clairvoyant Irish soldiers’ wives, midnight trips up sleepy, hundred-degree minarets, leper–temples, fated train rides, sociopathic kings, spent morphine needles, bedeviled hands of whist, and skin-tingling rains—rains that induce parasthesia, or “creepy causeless skin feeling” (thanks to my friend David for the definition of parasthesia)…

**Some are only happy when it rains. Some even choose to leave important items such as cakes out in the rain. Bizarre culinary practices aside, I love a good downpour, esp. when going to sleep.

***I made up the second number. But Mr. Aubrey did change the play significantly from its last run, and I’m an optimist.

****The Assembly = Stephen Aubrey, Edward Bauer, Ben Beckley, Jess Chayes, Nick Benacerraf and Emily Perkins.