Brendan Hines, Kevin Rahm and Susannah Schulman in Three Days of Rain.

A Puzzle in Play Form

by Kimberly Colburn

It’s been a year since Walker has seen his sister Nan, or any of his family. It’s also been a year since their father, the architect Edmund Janeway, died. Since Walker disappeared, they haven’t been able to read Ned’s will. It doesn’t help that Nan and Walker’s mother, Lina, has been in and out of mental institutions since 1972.

As the play begins, Nan meets Walker at a downtown Greenwich Village apartment. It’s the same apartment where their father Ned got his start with his partner, Theo Wexler, some 30 years earlier. Theo died soon after they achieved their first big success, a private home known as the Janeway house that was famously photographed for the cover of Life magazine in the early 1960s. Now, to Nan's dismany, Walker has found Ned’s journal from that time, but he is struggling to decipher the short, cryptic entries.

Nan and Walker are joined by Theo’s son, Phillip, called Pip. Pip is a soap opera actor, and he’s as congenial and good-natured as Walker is sensitive and brooding. The now-grown children have been reunited, but the baggage their relationships had in childhood lingers. As secrets are revealed, the nature of the questions turns from themselves to their parents—just what was going on when their parents were young and starting out? Can we know the truth of the past? Can the past show us the possibilities of the future?

The elegant, architectural simplicity of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain belies its complicated questions about relationships and the weight of the past. In an interview with Playbill before the New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, Greenberg described his play: “The play makes you assemble it. It lays out two sets of information, and you have to put them together. The first act is the present dreaming the past, and the second act is the past dreaming the future. The play is really about the gulf between those two ideas. It's a play about ambiguity, built on irony. The subject is how little we can know, how much we can know, how much we need to know. The way it works is the audience finds out more than anyone onstage will ever know.”

Three Days of Rain premiered at SCR in 1997 and went on to great success. It won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received Olivier, Drama Desk and Hull-Warriner nominations. In addition to productions on Broadway and London’s West End (see sidebar), it has been produced at countless theatres around the country.

In this all-new production directed by Founding Artistic Director David Emmes, the play returns home to SCR. “Three Days of Rain is one of my favorite of the many Greenberg plays we’ve produced. It’s an enormously engaging story following children and parents and how the past can easily be manipulated. I’m attracted by the intelligence and wit so articulately expressed by the characters. We’ve got a terrific cast and an excellent team of designers, and I’m looking forward to this process.”

Meet the cast in the sidebar below. The set, complete with the titular rain, will be designed by Tom Buderwitz, whose recent work at SCR includes The Weir and Crimes of the Heart. Cricket S. Myers, who was recently nominated for a Tony for her work on Bengal Tiger at the Bagdhad Zoo, will design the sound. Lighting design will be by SCR veteran Lonnie Alcaraz, and making her SCR debut is costume designer Holly Poe Durbin. 

About the playwright: Richard Greenberg

Richard Greenberg has had more SCR commissions than any other playwright (11, to date). He’s also near the top of our list of most-produced playwrights, with 10 productions to date, most recently Our Mother’s Brief Affair in 2009 and The Injured Party in 2008. Three Days of Rain was the third premiere of one of his plays at SCR, and is the first of his plays to be revived here.

His play Take Me Out won the Tony Award in 2003 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a winner of the Oppenheimer Award and the first winner of the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a playwright in mid-career.

Playwright Richard Greenberg

Meet the Cast of Three Days of Rain

Brendan Hines, Kevin Rahm and Susannah Schulman

The cast of Three Days of Rain includes SCR veterans Susannah Schulman and Kevin Rahm and newcomer Brendan Hines. Susannah was recently seen on the Segerstrom Stage as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has performed in numerous productions, since her first show at SCR, Taming of the Shrew in 1996. She worked with director David Emmes previously in Six Degrees of Separation.  Kevin Rahm first appeared in Kate Robin’s What They Have in 2008, though he’s also appeared in several readings. You might recognize him from some of his television roles—he’s currently on "Desperate Housewives" and was a regular on "Judging Amy." Brendan Hines is making his SCR debut but is also a face you might have seen on television. He has got a recurring role on "Lie to Me" with Tim Roth, and his guest-starring role on "Castle" aired recently.

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