Intriguing journey to the past in ‘Three Days of Rain’
“Three Days of Rain” is concerned with connection: Our connection with family, our connection with friends, our connection with the truth and most of all, our connection with the past.
The play by Richard Greenberg, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, is onstage in an appropriately intimate production by The Ensemble Company. As directed by Matthew MacDermid, the hazy tentacles linking past to present hang delicately in the air, especially in the much sharper first act.
Greenberg has artfully constructed his play so the three actors each play two roles. The first act takes place in the 1990s when Walker Janeway (Geoffrey Lawrence) has returned home after a year’s disappearance for the reading of his father’s will. Also attending: His sister Nan (Sarah French) and Pip (Steven Johnson), a longtime friend who is the son of their late father’s partner in an architecture firm.
As the trio discusses the fate of Janeway House — a distinctive building that was their fathers’ greatest achievement — the audience sees their perspective on their parents and their shared history. But Act 2 takes place some 30 years prior and shows us the reality of what happened among architect Ned Janeway (Lawrence), his partner Theo (Johnson) and Lina (French), the woman who would become Walker and Nan’s mother.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as Greenberg ponders the importance of what parents show and tell their children, the past isn’t exactly as Walker, Nan and Pip picture it. Even the play’s titular “Three Days of Rain” — a cryptically banal journal entry in 1995 — takes on new significance in 1960.
Greenberg’s writing is lyrical at its best, often witty, and peppered with astute insights. “Despair can be attractive … in a young person,” Pip remarks. The actors also do a masterful job of using the dialogue to illuminate their characters. When French, as Nan, enters Walker’s shabby apartment and queries with a wrinkled nose: “Is this where you’re living?” we immediately have a sense of the
sort of woman Nan is. And the playwright — and actors — niftily create echoes of the older generation in the younger.
After the intriguing and wellpaced setup of the first act, things sag in the second. Once it becomes clear how the older generation is going to get from point A to point B, the dramatic stakes feel lessened, especially as a dinner scene goes on and on. And while Greenberg has
surprises in store for his two male characters, the biggest surprise about Lina is how he fails to satisfactorily connect the woman we see in Act 2 to the woman we heard about in Act 1.
And where the tension should feel highest in Act 2, it curiously does not.
French makes underwritten Lina a pleasure to watch but really shines as well-adjusted, frustrated, loving, down-toearth Nan. Lawrence succeeds in making Walker — a bundle of neuroses and aggravating behavior — relatable and even sympathetic; his Ned is equally sympathetic but not as layered as such a complicated man could be. Johnson does fine work switching between Pip, a man completely comfortable in his own skin, and his father, Theo — a man who decidedly is not.
The plot plays out on Bonnie Sprung’s tidy and inventive set that cleverly provides an exterior and interior for that shabby apartment while neatly emphasizing that these characters, for better or for worse, are confined with each other and their shared history — even if that history isn’t true at all.
If you go
Length: 2:05, including intermission
Where: Penguin Point Productions at Oviedo Mall, 1700 Oviedo Mall Blvd. in Oviedo
When: Through Jan. 30
Cost: $16-$20
Info: penguinpointproductions. com/tickets