"Three Days of Rain" with Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper
I saw "Three Days of Rain" with my friend and colleague, Desiree Brennan, three years ago during the Broadway run. It was Julia Roberts stage debut. Dez and I were inspired to get tickets to see if Julia Roberts had the "right stuff" for the stage. She didn't quite, but she was not an embarrassment. Paul Rudd is also an accomplished film actor and as handsome as Juila Roberts is beautiful, so the eye candy quotient for this play cannot be overestimated. However, it was an actor neither Dez nor I had ever heard of, Bradley Cooper, who managed to upstage both Roberts and Rudd whenever he was in a scene with them.
"Three Days of Rain" really is a very good play, not a great one, but a very good one. Since we all come from families and all families have their individual stories, I should think it would be relevant and compelling to everyone. It especially touched me, because a taciturn father's diary figures prominently in the play, and I will leave behind to my nieces and nephews hundreds of letters, e-letters memoirs and travelogues dating back to the summer of 1967. They are the journal I am otherwise not disciplined enough to keep. I am never at a loss for words, and I write easily about my emotions. Nan Walker was not such a man. His diary is maddenly cryptic, and it's lack of real substance frustrates his children to no end. My nieces and nephews will not have that problem! Their problem will be finding the time to read the volumes I bequeath them!
Roberts and Rudd play the children, Nan and Walker, of a mother, Lana, who battled mental illness all her life and a famous architect father, Ned, who was emotionally distant from his children the entire time they were growing up. Walker apparently suffered more from his father's distance than the sister. At any rate, the play is driven by his neuroses and his point of view. He's never settled down, indeed, has returned only coincidentally for the distribution of the father's will, after a year absence during which time he just fell of the face of the earth. Nan appears very unfeeling at first, because she won't even return her brother's embrace, and then you discover that she's very hurt and angry, because the brother just took off. She didn't know whether he was alive or dead and didn't have had any idea where he was to let him know his father had died. He missed the funeral.
As the plays opens, Walker has returned to Manhattan, where he is staying in a hovel that was once the apartment the father shared with his friend and partner whose son, Pip, is a life long friend and is the third in the troika of this three person play. Walker discovers a journal the father kept, but the journal is no more garrulous than the father was in life. Walker mentions something about the "perversity" of keeping a journal only to remain as silent in it as one was in life. The entries are terse and cryptic. One entry, April 3-6 says only, "Three days of rain." " A freaking weather report!" is how Walker dismisses his father's journal. He wants so badly to find the connection to his father that he never had while the father was alive. Another series of entries records the death of the father's life long friend and partner, Theo. "Theo is dying." "Theo is dying." "Theo is dying." "Theo is dead."
In the second act, the children have become the parents and Pip has become the partner, Theo. We discover that the three days of rain refer to the three days when Theo was away, and his sometime girlfriend, Lana, visited Ned. The two talk and talk. Ned stutters which may be part of the reason for his silence when the children were growing up, but the two connect, sleep with each other, and fall in love during those three days of rain. At one point, Lana picks up the diary that Ned just bought and reads his entry, "Three days of rain," wondering who will ever know what that means. "You and I will know what that means," he replies.
It's a play about how hard it is to truly know a person, if it's possible at all. The diary reminded me of "The Invention of Love," of A. E. Houseman's diary, of his terse and cryptic remarks about his college roommate, perhaps lover but perhaps only object of affection. "Saw him today" is about the extent of it. Houseman had no difficulty at all in coming up with an entire book to explain a lone extant phrase of an ancient Greek or Latin text, but he didn't say much more about his feelings than what is mysteriously recorded in his journal. Of course, a journal figures prominently in "Sunday in the Park with George," too. Dot is a bit more wordy, but not much, and what is written remains frustratingly oblique to the surviving great-grandson.
Roberts was leaden during the first act, just like the critics said when it opened. She did perk up while playing the aging (thirty year old) Southern Belle, Lana, who, when she and Ned fall in love, is already in an inchoate stage of the madness which would overtake her. Rudd was very good and very good looking, but the friend and then partner in the second act, Pip and Theo, dominated the stage whenever he was on it. He was wonderful. Bradley Cooper played both characters. The play's not a new one. Apparently the Arden did it several years back, but somehow I missed it. I'd like to see it again some day and will keep an eye out for it.
"Three Days of Rain" really is a very good play, not a great one, but a very good one. Since we all come from families and all families have their individual stories, I should think it would be relevant and compelling to everyone. It especially touched me, because a taciturn father's diary figures prominently in the play, and I will leave behind to my nieces and nephews hundreds of letters, e-letters memoirs and travelogues dating back to the summer of 1967. They are the journal I am otherwise not disciplined enough to keep. I am never at a loss for words, and I write easily about my emotions. Nan Walker was not such a man. His diary is maddenly cryptic, and it's lack of real substance frustrates his children to no end. My nieces and nephews will not have that problem! Their problem will be finding the time to read the volumes I bequeath them!
Roberts and Rudd play the children, Nan and Walker, of a mother, Lana, who battled mental illness all her life and a famous architect father, Ned, who was emotionally distant from his children the entire time they were growing up. Walker apparently suffered more from his father's distance than the sister. At any rate, the play is driven by his neuroses and his point of view. He's never settled down, indeed, has returned only coincidentally for the distribution of the father's will, after a year absence during which time he just fell of the face of the earth. Nan appears very unfeeling at first, because she won't even return her brother's embrace, and then you discover that she's very hurt and angry, because the brother just took off. She didn't know whether he was alive or dead and didn't have had any idea where he was to let him know his father had died. He missed the funeral.
As the plays opens, Walker has returned to Manhattan, where he is staying in a hovel that was once the apartment the father shared with his friend and partner whose son, Pip, is a life long friend and is the third in the troika of this three person play. Walker discovers a journal the father kept, but the journal is no more garrulous than the father was in life. Walker mentions something about the "perversity" of keeping a journal only to remain as silent in it as one was in life. The entries are terse and cryptic. One entry, April 3-6 says only, "Three days of rain." " A freaking weather report!" is how Walker dismisses his father's journal. He wants so badly to find the connection to his father that he never had while the father was alive. Another series of entries records the death of the father's life long friend and partner, Theo. "Theo is dying." "Theo is dying." "Theo is dying." "Theo is dead."
In the second act, the children have become the parents and Pip has become the partner, Theo. We discover that the three days of rain refer to the three days when Theo was away, and his sometime girlfriend, Lana, visited Ned. The two talk and talk. Ned stutters which may be part of the reason for his silence when the children were growing up, but the two connect, sleep with each other, and fall in love during those three days of rain. At one point, Lana picks up the diary that Ned just bought and reads his entry, "Three days of rain," wondering who will ever know what that means. "You and I will know what that means," he replies.
It's a play about how hard it is to truly know a person, if it's possible at all. The diary reminded me of "The Invention of Love," of A. E. Houseman's diary, of his terse and cryptic remarks about his college roommate, perhaps lover but perhaps only object of affection. "Saw him today" is about the extent of it. Houseman had no difficulty at all in coming up with an entire book to explain a lone extant phrase of an ancient Greek or Latin text, but he didn't say much more about his feelings than what is mysteriously recorded in his journal. Of course, a journal figures prominently in "Sunday in the Park with George," too. Dot is a bit more wordy, but not much, and what is written remains frustratingly oblique to the surviving great-grandson.
Roberts was leaden during the first act, just like the critics said when it opened. She did perk up while playing the aging (thirty year old) Southern Belle, Lana, who, when she and Ned fall in love, is already in an inchoate stage of the madness which would overtake her. Rudd was very good and very good looking, but the friend and then partner in the second act, Pip and Theo, dominated the stage whenever he was on it. He was wonderful. Bradley Cooper played both characters. The play's not a new one. Apparently the Arden did it several years back, but somehow I missed it. I'd like to see it again some day and will keep an eye out for it.
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