Three Days of Rain

My mother had a foolproof method of judging a movie: if she fell asleep while she was watching, it was a great show. My method is a little different: if I wake up thinking about a show, it was amazing.

Several mornings in a row now, I have found myself marveling over the story shared with me on the Gerding Theatre Center Stage, "Three Days of Rain," by Richard Greenberg. Lisa Datz and Silas Weir Mitchell play a brother and sister (Nan and Walker Janeway) brought together for the reading of their father's will. Sasha Roiz plays Pip Wexler, the son of their father's business partner.

The three also play their respective parents in the flashback second act set in 1960: Datz and Mitchell play Lina and Ned Janeway, and Roiz plays Theo Wexler.

"Three Days of Rain" is a play about people figuring out who they are and how their parents influenced who they became. So it's a play about all of us, about the calculus we all do when we become adults and ponder our personality quirks or realize the extent of our damaged psyches or wonder where in the hell we got that funny habit. In "Three Days of Rain," the reading of the will and the discovery of a journal set in motion a painful and revealing trip through their parents' histories.

"Three Days of Rain," Mitchell was quoted as saying, is "word perfect." He was absolutely right; this play is beautiful and moving, charming and challenging, with nary a strange note amid the lyrical language. While a play so carefully written could be stilted, the dialogue of "Three Days" undulates in melodic motion, aided by the skilled actors playing this marvelous tune.

As "word perfect" as the play is, so too are the performances. Each person has to play two vastly different people, and each delivers mightily. Datz' Janeway women are polar opposites, one extreme (mentally ill mother) responsible for creating the other (co-dependent super-capable daughter). Datz imbues Nan with a solidity that's simply not part of flitty Lina's person.

Mitchell's Janeway men are differently different: Walker is unhinged and Ned is buttoned down. Walker has absorbed his mother's butterfly fragility, but Mitchell's Ned is sturdy, plodding. Directly from Ned, Walker took his tendency to tear paper into long strips, attempting to destroy his own thoughts and ideas in favor of someone else's. We carry inexorably our parents' behaviors in ways we don't realize, and some we do.

From Roiz, we get Pip and Theo, both men who skate along the surface of life. Pip is delighted to live purely in the moment, a characteristic we see, charmingly enough, in Lina. Theo has a darker nature, a man terrified of his own lack of substance, afraid he will fail to live up to the great heights of achievement he has conned everyone around him into expecting from him. Theo and Pip are both tremendous actors playing out their own lives, putting up appearances.

The interchange of the three in 1995 informs our understanding of the three in 1960, and vice versa.
It is an incredibly intriguing and thought-provoking play. The one section of the play with which I had an issue was the broken fourth wall.

The play is such a strong piece of writing that the device of telling the audience directly, as if we were part of a group assembled at a memorial service listening to family stories, jarred me. I kept wondering what the characters were thinking about the audience: in the narrative, what part did the audience play? My distraction over those questions took me out of the story, and I found that interruption annoying.

Nevertheless, these are characters and stories with insight, with impact. "Three Days of Rain" functions as a genogram, a map to our parents' life experiences and traumas that led to creating us. The things we think we know about our parents are usually not the whole truth about them. Like us, they were once people with dreams and fears and failures long before they became the monolithic, static parent figures of our lives. "Three Days of Rain" unpacks the history of these three damaged people and, in doing so, inspires consideration of our own parents' histories.

As my mother let stories seep into her subconscious while she was asleep, I find great stories stir me to consciousness, waking my mind to trails of thought I hadn't before considered. Richard Greenberg, in this sensitive, raw, and surprisingly funny play, brings you into a family's exhumation, carefully laying out pieces of their past for closer examination. Greenberg's attempt at the process -- and this moving production -- is a work of art.

"Three Days of Rain" runs through June 21 at US Bank Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., Portland, OR 97209. For tickets and information, call 503-445-3700 or visit www.pcs.org/threedays