Review: Three Days of Rain at The Hideout

And maybe that's okay for a play whose real claim to fame—who gives a fuck about a Pulitzer nomination?—is that it was the first serious stage role of Julia Roberts, back in 2006, when she starred alongside Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper in the short-lived, critically-damned Broadway production of Three Days of Rain. Even now, three years and almost two thousand miles removed, it's hard to talk about the play without mentioning it. Because a major contemporary work like this one demands context, and the major context of Three Days of Rain is that it's a piece that failed in New York when the ostentatious script was performed by equally attention-grabbing movie stars, and its Austin production similarly chucks out the notion of a subtle interpretation in favor of being constantly on.

Or at least, that's how the first act goes. The strangest thing about Penfold's Three Days of Rain is how different the two acts are. Not just because all three actors—Martin, Gay, and Nathan Jerkins—swap out their roles as contemporary children struggling with parent issues for a turn as those parents, but because director Ryan Crowder finally allows us a few genuine, quiet moments to get to know these people.

A little bit of plot, before we go on: Sean Martin stars, initially, as Walker, a tortured-and-brilliant young man whose gifts for elucidation are unremarked upon by the other characters in the play, but suggest that he really must be a genius, in order for him to constantly drop unlikely phrases into casual conversation. He's Manic. Sarah Gay first appears as Nan, Walker's sister, who is Annoyed. Mostly with Walker, for disappearing for a year and failing to inform her of whether he was alive or dead, but also because that just seems to be her demeanor. And finally Nathan Jerkins makes his first appearance on the Hideout's stage as Pip, who is Exasperated as a happy-go-lucky television star who has grown up alongside the siblings, the son of their father's business partner.

All of those capital letters up there—"Manic", "Annoyed", and "Exasperated"—are like that because that's really all the definition we get to these people. The dialogue is a mouthful, and Crowder, seemingly mindful of how interminable the play might be to get through if the lines were delivered at a pace resembling a human conversation, has the actors deliver it in a style that exceeds rapid-fire and moves on to fully automatic. It's not that we can't understand what they're saying, but we're never given a moment to believe that these are actual words exchanged by actual people—the play never feels like it's anything other than a performance for an audience—and it makes it difficult to really give a shit about what any of them are going through. Walker is tortured; Nan is frustrated; Pip finds them both absurd. Who fucking cares?

As the first act unfolds, the exposition revealed to the audience is that the two sets of parents inflicted some damage on their kids—mostly on Nan and Walker, whose mother's madness scarred the pair of them, but especially Walker, at a young age. Walker, however, has discovered his father's journal, and believes he's come to understand the mysteries of the man's life.

If that doesn't sound exactly like compelling drama, it's because it isn't. The biggest flaw in Greenberg's script isn't the self-fellating cleverness of his dialogue, it's the failure to create the necessary level of first-act tension to make us want a second act. There aren't burning questions about what could have possibly happened between their parents to turn the children into such fuck-ups. (Those are answered in Nan's introductory monologue to the audience, in which she tells a story that we can presume is fully exemplary of their mother's madness—she freaked out and ran through a window once when the kids were little.) The mysteries we're left with are of the fully unspectacular variety: Why is Walker named "Walker"? Why was Pip's father, Theo, sad the day he met his wife? Did Walker and Nan's parents love each other? Who was the genius between Theo and Ned? What does "three days of rain" mean?

None of these questions are central to the conflict of the first act, and so there's really no reason to stick around to learn the answers. In fact, they're not really presented as questions at all—just statements of fact uttered in the midst of high-speed dialogue between the loquacious chatterbugs we see throughout the first half of the play. There's hardly even a variation in tone or delivery throughout the entire act, so there's no way to know that these bits of information are actually important. Why stick around?

Well, you stick around because the second act is actually really charming. It's a major reversal from the piece we started with, and Martin—who comes off as phony as Walker—shines as Ned. Gay's one-note turn as the unsmiling Nan is shed as she inhabits her quirky, yet sincere, mother, Lina. And even Jerkins, who plays Pip's father, Theo, in much the same manner he interpreted the son, is more fun to watch when his performance isn't one of three crowding the stage with a relentlessly unfocused energy. The answers to the questions of the first act become incidental as the play goes on—they come across more as bonus references for people who bothered paying attention, rather than as important bits of information—but the easy chemistry between Ned and Lina, as well as Greenberg's construction of character, when he allows those characters to breath, is a joy to watch.

The redundant cleverness of Greenberg's script, encouraged at times by Crowder's direction and the performances he pulls out of the cast, may be responsible for the relief that accompanies the second half. It's kind of weird—the fact that there's so much that grates about the contemporary scenes may actually work in the play's favor in the end. The children all come off as self-absorbed fuck-ups suffering from some deep trauma that they assume is related to their parents' tragic relationships. The revelation that so much of what they believe was more ordinary, and more pleasant, than they think is down refreshing. At the very least, it confirms that the audience member who can't stand them isn't just being an asshole for passing judgment.