Richard Greenberg bolsters Three Days of Rain with so many strengths, it feels downright ungrateful to mention its only weakness. After all, this is a play with spectacularly intelligent dialogue, complicated dual roles that allow actors to show their chops and even a set change calculated for an ambitious designer. There's also a good mystery: What did famous architect Ned Janeway mean when he noted in his diary the cryptic words "Three days of rain"?
Greenberg introduces us to Janeway's son, who discovers the diary and then takes us back decades, to the master himself on the day that he wrote the enigmatic words in his journal. And Greenberg doesn't only pose questions in his cleverly constructed play; he also answers them, mercifully, along with a few we didn't think to ask. By the end of the evening, we know things about Ned Janeway and his great creation, the Janeway House, that son Walker never guessed. And we've been entertained, intellectually stimulated and treated to some potent acting. We have lots of reasons to be satisfied.
But ultimately we're not, and it's all because of that one little defect: author Greenberg has next to nothing to say. His technical mastery, the brilliance of his dialogue, the originality of his conception aren't mixed with a single meaningful insight on life, on the world, on art or ambition. At the end of two hours we know something about Ned Janeway, but it's hardly more important to us than his middle name or his favorite dessert. Our best playwrights are also thinkers, truth-tellers and seers who have something crucial to relate to us about our existence on this globe. Greenberg is all craft, erudition and psychology untouched by philosophy. He's monumentally gifted except in the area of significance. We can't help but ask: So what?
The problem's not in the plot, which is original and full of promise. The play begins on the day of the reading of Ned Janeway's will. Gathered in the former studio of the great man and his partner, Theo, are brother and sister, Walker and Nan Janeway, along with Theo's son, Pip Wexler. It's here that we discover the existence of Ned's diary and also the fact that Walker feels alienated from his late, laconic father, as well as from his mentally troubled mother.
We also learn that the Walker-Nan-Pip triad may be unstable because of lingering sexual tensions. Then we're on to the second act, in which the two male parents of the characters in act one are having trouble devising what will come to be their most famous project, and a woman named Lina, ostensibly slick Theo's girlfriend, has designs upon awkward Ned. If Act One contained suggestions of a love triangle, Act Two offers the real thing; and when it's all over we even see Ned write in his journal the words "Three days of rain." We know, in other words, what son Walker can only guess at. And we may also know something about the real inspiration of the world-famous Janeway House.
All along we're treated to dialogue of impressive quality. Listening to the characters of Three Days of Rain is an experience so pleasing that one finds oneself waiting greedily for each well-crafted line. The words "serendipity," "palimpsest" and "pentimento" turn up in a short speech by Walker, and Theo refers to an unexpected architectural insight as "Emerson on the I.R.T." Goethe, Nan reminds us, defined architecture as "frozen music," and Lina remembers being mistaken for "one of those girls from 15 years ago all Quattrocento-pale and dull-eyed and glazed and smugly silent because they possess the secret of the universe and you don't."
These are educated characters, civilized and at ease with art and architecture, literature and psychiatry. Occasionally their remarks are startlingly fresh — "Abstractions are turning into facts very quickly these days," says Lina — and at their worst they still sound like people you'd like to chat with. If facility with dialogue were all that mattered, Three Days of Rain would be a masterpiece.
The opportunity it offers three talented actors is another plus. In the American Stage production, Brian Shea plays Walker Janeway as well as his father, Ned; Julie Rowe plays Nan and her mother, Lina; and Scott Lucy plays Pip Wexler and his father Theo. Naturally, a spectator is curious as to which of the actors can successfully transform from child to parent without vestiges of one role seeping into the other, and the frontrunner here is: Julie Rowe.
She is as different in her two roles as two separate characters can be, playing Nan as a judgmental, somewhat icily self-possessed Northerner and Lina as a garrulous, unbalanced and needy Southerner. Shea is almost as good, appearing as neurotically itinerant Walker and painfully shy Ned — but there are moments when certain familiar gestures (familiar to anyone who knows Shea's work, anyway) show up in both parts. Finally, Lucy's Pip and Theo are equally charming and ingratiating, but too similar (and his hair is too long for 1960).
Nevertheless, all three actors work together with real electricity. If Greenberg had something to tell us, you can be sure these intelligent, skillful performers would find it.
But he doesn't, and they can't. Todd Olson's fine directing — using areas off- as well as onstage — illuminates everything Greenberg offers, which is, unfortunately, not enough. Jeff Dean's two eloquent sets — first, the architects' office after years of neglect and then in its heyday — can't add significance where none exists.
Three Days of Rain, like Greenberg's Take Me Out and The American Plan, is about as interesting as theater without insight ever gets. And it reminds you why certain playwrights whose dialogue is crude by comparison — Sam Shepard, say, or even Harold Pinter — are far more important than a linguistic wizard like Greenberg. Shepard and Pinter know something; we don't mind the bumpy ride since it promises to lead us toward some difficult truth. But 10 minutes after Three Days of Rain, we're already thinking about something else. For all its intelligence, the play is no more resonant than an Agatha Christie thriller.
So what did Ned Janeway mean by "Three days of rain"?
Find out at American Stage. And then feel free to change the subject.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 4, 2006.