REVIEW: Greenberg's 'Rain' gets intimate, sensitive staging at Compass

By ANNE MARIE WELSH - For the North County Times | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 9:42 AM PDT ∞

Seen up close at the intimate Compass Theatre, Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain" continues to glimmer with new facets 10 years after its premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

New Yorkers may know this reflective play best from a soundly panned 2006 Broadway revival in which Julia Roberts made a wooden stage debut, yet turned the production into the hottest ticket in town. Southern Californians, however, have had three shots at seeing solid productions of this intricately structured and absorbing drama. After the SCR premiere in 1997, the Old Globe produced an effective staging ---- complete with real raindrops ---- in 1999 in the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Rosina Reynolds has now directed it for Compass (formerly Sixth@Penn). She's cast the three-character play sensitively, avoided many landmines of too-glib comedy in Greenberg's dazzling dialogue and paced the first act effectively. Act 2 proved pokey the night I attended, a problem that may remedy itself as the run continues.

An elegant and involving puzzle, "Three Days of Rain" unfolds backward in time as three 30somethings, curious about their origins, draw conclusions about their parents, but ultimately arrive no closer to the truth than did the generation ahead of them.

The first act is set in 1995 Manhattan in a musty loft where the confused and hyperkinetic Walker has landed after nine months spent running away in Europe. There his worried-sick suburban sister Nan finds him, and there too, their lifelong friend Pip joins them. Actors Sean Cox and Christy Yael are the gradually reconciling brother and sister; Jason Heil plays Pip, a seemingly shallow soap opera star who was the son of Theo, the architectural partner of the siblings' father Ned.

All three actors are persuasive here. Cox bounces manically through Walker's fears that he may turn out to be as mad as his mother. Yael's Nan, enraged by her brother's long absence, slowly softens to accept again this neurotic, super-articulate man whose instability has made her his increasingly unwilling protector.

And as Pip, Heil makes you believe that the chipper, successful actor he plays may be much more than he seems when he delivers a typical Greenberg line: "Being in a good mood is just not the same thing as being a moron. It just isn't."

Walker has discovered a diary stuffed in a mattress in the loft ---- the place where his father Ned and his partner Theo launched the architectural career that made them international celebrities. Walker's recently deceased and always reticent, if not silent, father had written this first entry: "April 3-5; three days of rain," a report so bereft of emotion it drives Walker up the wall and toward all manner of assumptions about the man whose eccentric will he, his sister and Pip have just read.

The second act takes place 35 years earlier in 1960. At Compass, Matt Warburton's sound design provides those three days of rain, while the same three actors now play the parents of Pip, Nan and Walker just starting out. Surprises are embedded in Greenerg's plot, so deftly embedded that they require the audience to re-examine the expectations set up in the first act and to follow the emotional and professional travails of the parental generation with unusually rapt attention.

Heil ---- who bounds about the intimate Compass space as the "visionary" architect Theo ---- seems very much the kind of career-centered father whose genes would have produced the Pip we met earlier. So too with Yael playing Lina, the highly educated and high-strung mother of Nan and Walker. Greenberg's writing makes her something of a Tennessee Williams stereotype, but Yael, a beautiful and versatile performer, individualizes Lina's flighty, borderline alcoholic personality.

Actor Cox gets the difficult assignment of playing the reticent, stuttering Ned (Walker and Nan's father) and does so with a tentativeness that slows the second act and flattens the lyricism so beautifully worked by director Reynolds in the first scenes.

Greenberg's polished, fluent, sometimes too-literate dialogue, presents its own challenges, and these are gamely met by the director and her cast throughout, however.

If you haven't seen "Three Days of Rain," one of the prolific Greenberg's best and most engrossing plays, now's your chance.

"Three Days of Rain"

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; through June 19

Where: Compass Theatre, 3704 Sixth Ave., San Diego

Tickets: $22

Phone: (619) 688-9210

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