Reviews

Three Days of Rain

Film star Julia Roberts acquits herself very well in her Broadway debut.

Paul Rudd and Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain
(Photo © Joan Marcus)
Paul Rudd and Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain
(Photo © Joan Marcus)

To answer the question that people rightly or wrongly are asking first about the revival of Richard Greenberg’s ingeniously touching Three Days of Rain: She’s fine. Really, Julia Roberts is just fine in the show.

The second question, which seems to baffle some local wags and nags, is why America’s biggest female star has chosen this particular play, which was seen here a decade ago at Manhattan Theatre Club, as the vehicle for her Broadway debut. I think Roberts wisely decided to appear in a play that she doesn’t have to bear alone on her rather thin shoulders. Indeed, she has perhaps the least meaty of the play’s roles. In the first act, she’s relatively stable Nan, who’s nervously worrying about her wanderlust-struck brother Walker and his troubled state of mind over their father’s legacy. In the second act, she transforms into Nan’s incipiently alcoholic mother, Lina, seen during a crucial three day period 25 years earlier.

Looking unprepossessing in a drab trenchcoat as she walks about a dingy loft (both courtesy of set and costume designer Santo Loquastro), the sunken-cheeked Roberts does a nice job of conveying Nan’s subtle changes in attitude towards the fast-talking Walker (Paul Rudd). It seems that her brother has major, unresolved issues with the siblings’ late father, a world-famous architect. Although Nan airs her angry opinions about Walker’s erratic behavior, she spends much of her stage time quietly listening to him confront Pip (Bradley Cooper), the son of their father’s former partner, over their closely bonded childhood and adolescence. Whether speaking or observing, Roberts has use of that mobile face the camera loves; and even without the benefit of close-ups, she can be seen constantly registering truthful responses to what’s going on. Nan grapples with the love, frustration, and puzzlement she experiences in her brother’s maddening company, and Roberts clearly communicates everything the character feels.

In the second act, which supplies the facts pertinent to what the first-act characters long to know, Roberts plays a Southern belle exhibiting a thirst for mint juleps with all ingredients eliminated except the bourbon. Lina also has a taste for the genius Theo (Cooper), but she eventually acquires a stronger taste for Ned (Rudd), a charming stutterer. During this act, Roberts finally gets to flash and then flash again that famous, multi-million-dollar smile. Curiously, however, the Georgia-born actress’s Southern accent is a sometime thing. Also, she’s still not completely comfortable on stage and spends a great deal of time with her right arm akimbo. (This gesture could be the performer’s way of handling unease, or it could be a canny acting choice that implies Nan has taken on some of Lina’s mannerisms.)

Under Joe Mantello’s smart and ever-kinetic direction, both Rudd and Cooper (who is also making his Broadway bow) give sensational performances. Rudd does an amazing change of pace from Act I, when Walker chatters compulsively, to Act II, when Ned can hardly negotiate a sentence without getting hung up on a word or two along the way. By the time the final curtain drops, Rudd has shown us two men who are alike only in their uncertainty about themselves and their prospects, the harsh irony being that the father will have an incalculable and irrevocable effect on the son.

From the instant that Cooper — who has starred in the TV series Alias and Kitchen Confidential — enters as the devil-may-care Pip, an on-to-himself soap-opera actor, he holds the audience in the palm of his hand. Tall, handsome, and ebullient, he gives the kind of vital performance that has patrons missing him when he leaves the stage and brightening when he returns. Well, this is true in the first act, anyway; in the second act, Cooper is more somber as an architect who knows that he’s supposed to be inspired but can locate no sparks in himself. With his work in this play, Cooper stakes his claim to a promising stage career.

Greenberg has joked that Three Days of Rain is no longer his but now belongs to Roberts instead. The truth is that the play — all about what parents can and can’t pass along to their children — will still have melancholy meaning when other talented actors plumb its depths, even if those casts don’t attract the same amount of attention as this one.