In all families, there is at least some gap between how much kids want to know about their parents’ early adult life, and how much the parents would rather not divulge—which is ultimately probably a good thing. How many people really want the gory details of their parents’ college years?
These communication gaps become the driving tension in Richard Greenberg’s play Three Days of Rain, which will be put on by the Jewel Theatre Company at the Center Stage, starting Feb. 28. Walker, one the leading characters in the opening act, finds a single journal entry his recently deceased father left, which he believes sheds light into the man he really was. Walker is later shown to be completely wrong.
“We inevitably have a hunger to create a narrative out of a few crumbs of facts that are handed down to us, and we tend to want to put them together in a story. It’s very human to do that,” says Bill Peters, the director of this production. “But inherent in that is the fact that you had to be there. Even if you were there, you would probably make certain kinds of assumptions that wouldn’t be 100 percent accurate.”
The play, nominated in 1998 for a Pulitzer Prize, opens with Walker, his sister Nan, and childhood friend, Pip, reading the will left by Walker and Nan’s father, Ned. There it is revealed that Pip, not even related to Ned, is to be given the famous Janeway House that Ned designed when he was a young architect.
A lot is suggested about the Janeway House, though little is actually revealed. The audience understands that it was the first major house that Ned designed, and that it is universally considered to be a spectacular work of genius. This last fact is never actually shown, nor explained in any way, sort of like the contents in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction.
“This isn’t quite the kind of play where you have clues, the way you would have in a murder mystery where there are very specific things that have set people on the wrong track, and they’re kind of headed down that track until that very specific thing is corrected at the end of the play. This play doesn’t have that kind of determinism to it,” Peters says.
The second act shifts to a time period years earlier, when the Janeway House was being designed. Here Ned meets with Lina (Walker and Nan’s mother) and Theo—Ned’s business partner, and Pip’s father. More details of the Janeway House, and the parents’ early lives are revealed, and assumptions that the children have made, not just in terms of the actual facts, but regarding the motivations behind them, are shown to be much different than reality. Most importantly, the parents are shown to be different people than the children have come to believe them to be.
Like Greenberg’s other plays (Eastern Standard, Take Me Out) Three Days of Rain is dark, though not depressingly so. It’s grounded in a tone that is both realistic and comedic.
“I find it a wonderful optimistic and enthusiastic play. I think that things that happen to the characters in other plays might be seen as severely disruptive or even tragic. But with this writer, he, like I think all the great humanistic writers, shows that unexpected things come into our lives all the time, that we need to persevere through and triumph over, somehow incorporate into the ongoing adventure of our lives,” says Peters.
Creativity is also a prominent theme in the play, as issues over how, why and who designed the brilliant Janeway House come to light.
“This will resonate with artists. There’s the whole issue of the source of creativity, the difficulties inherent in, like the writer facing a blank page, a musician facing silence. In this instance it’s an architect facing an empty space,” Peters says.
Three Days of Rain will be performed Feb. 27-March 16 at Center Stage in Santa Cruz.
