Tuesday, March 21, 2000
'Three Days of Rain' clears up in second act
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
DAYTON — Richard Greenburg's haunting Three Days of Rain is wrapping up its regional premiere run at Human Race this weekend. It's a strong enough interpretation of one of the best plays of the late '90s to recommend the drive up I-75.
The play opens in 1995, in a long abandoned Manhattan loft. It's where long-missing, easy to like but troubled Walker (LeBron Benton) has come to meet his sensible sister Nan (fine Cincinnati actress Sherman Fracher).
The loft was where their architect father Ned and partner Theo had started their wildly successful firm 35 years before. Theo has been dead long since, Ned died a year earlier. Now the siblings and Theo's son, Pip (Todd Lawson), are going to visit an attorney to hear about a will.
More than anything else, Walker wants the legendary house the partners designed for Ned's parents. It was their first great success.
Nomadic Ned, emotionally fragile like his mother, Lina, doesn't say so, but he wants the house because he never could find his father. Ned was present during the kids' childhood, but he was also absent.
In the loft, Ned has found his father's cryptic journal. The first entry is “Three days of rain.”
The play is something of a mystery, with clues peppered through the first act. The greater mystery that Mr. Greenburg explores is the unintentional emotional heartbreaks that come because of what we can never know about the human heart.
Mysteries are achingly solved when Act Two goes back in time to 1965, when the actors return as Ned, Theo and Lina. As they play out a pivotal moment in their lives, the audience is allowed to connect the past and present, and present and future. We sigh for all of them, for both generations of hopes, dreams, mistakes and resolutions.
Mr. Greenburg writes some of the most evocative, sophisticated and funny dialogue of any emerging American playwright. He also has a gift for complex and modern characters.
Director Marsha Hanna botches the first act, which is presented too blatantly, too loudly, too brashly when it needs subtlety and dimension. Walker isn't a gay stereotype, he's “sexually fluent.” Nan has hidden depths and secrets of her own.
The second act, though, is exactly right. Mr. Benton goes to the heart of shy, cautious Ned. Mr. Lawson captures Theo's mercurial nature, and Ms. Fracher is luminous as the woman they both love, offering whispers of hints of what will be.
Human Race has become a showcase for some of Cincinnati's best talent: next up, Cincinnati Shakespeare's Marni Penning and Naomi Bailis in Paula Vogel's Mineola Twins (April 13-30).
Three Days of Rain, through Sunday, Loft Theatre, Metropolitan Arts Building, 126 N. Main St., Dayton. (937) 228-3630.
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