Pretty Woman
Like playwright Richard Greenberg himself, a scribe of considerable size, ambition and prolificacy, his plays usually have a largeness about them, at least in the way he beautifully draws in intellectual topics no matter the plot, characters or setting. His 1997 play Three Days of Rain is therefore an anomaly, a three-character, unit-set play that's all about the well-drawn individuals inhabiting its world. The play's debut Broadway production, directed with sweet languor by Joe Mantello and starring Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper, is fascinating not because it's a star vehicle, but because it's about Roberts' humility as an actor. This allows us to consider Greenberg's expansive themes: life and death, art, intimacy and how we slay our personal demons by revisiting the past that created our present.
The present in Three Days means 1995, a downtown Manhattan loft where Walker (Rudd) is sacked out. He and Nan (Roberts), his married, motherly sister, are the children of Ned, a globally acclaimed architect whose great work, forged in the early '60s with a business partner named Theo, is called Janeway House. Its design, Walker confides in the first of a series of soliloquies offered by the characters, remains architecturally distinctive-"something carved from the moon."
Walker himself is a floppy-haired, "sexually fluent" disaster: aside from fitful sprints into architectural criticism, he hasn't much to show for his lineage. He's also been long out of touch, and when Nan arrives, she's anxious to hurry them off to hear the reading of their father's will. Walker resists, asking how Nan's twins are. After describing them, she adds, "They're not twins, of course, but that's the sort of detail I don't expect you to have memorized." You learn a lot about these siblings right there.
Here, Roberts acts sturdily and small-so much so that her work might be misinterpreted as listless or worse, unimaginative. But Nan is the more mature, less fleeting, not so neurotic version of Walker, and it's clear that their childhood was scarred by a quiet, ever-distant father and a mother, named Lina, who went insane. If only Walker could inherit or at least live in Janeway House, he'd stabilize. If only Walker could put down their father's diary, found under the bed in this loft he kept for 35 years, his anguish might alleviate, or so Nan thinks.
But Janeway House is willed to Pip (Cooper), the son of long-dead Theo and lifelong friend of Nan and Walker, which is like a bullet through Walker's heart: He has long been in love with Pip. Shockingly handsome and played with dazzling charisma by Cooper, Pip is a soap opera stud with the self-centeredness we might have expected (but never see) from Roberts. Indeed, compared to Cooper's work, which is flash, dash and a cozy theatrical tango with the audience, Roberts' measured performance in Act I is hard: Nan's lines are mostly short or abbreviated. The revelation that Pip and Nan once had a youthful fling helps fling the play, in Act II, back to 1960, in which the actors play the roles of the parents of their Act I characters.
Now it's Ned (Rudd) who is quieter, due to a severe (and brilliantly articulated) stutter. Theo (Cooper), like what Pip will become, is a cocksure extrovert but lacks artistic integrity. Theo, though, does have Lina, a late-Eisenhower era Southern belle whose drawl affords Roberts the chance to bring a bit of Smyrna, the Georgia town of her birth, to the play. (Curiously, her accent wobbles.) Desperate to find an architectural inspiration, Theo secludes himself away, leaving Ned and Lina over a weekend with three days of rain, to get to know each other carnally and otherwise.
Lina is a flibbertigibbet-we sense her insanity to come-and that's where Roberts' stage inexperience feels most acute. Her instincts are good, and while she's enormously giving to Rudd and Cooper, who take to the stage like divers to water, it's so clear she's still getting her feet wet. Yet it can be a minor rhapsody to watch Roberts assembling all the pieces. After all, she has a long list of Greenberg-esque intellectualisms to get through-here, a Jane Austen citation; there, phrases like "consecrate yourself to this vie de boheme existence." Roberts may not yet have polish, but she's game. That alone is worth the price of admission.