‘Three Days of Rain’ Paints a Breathtaking Picture of Life

A play about the unseen origins of the mistakes we make, “Three Days of Rain” glows with the magic a confident playwright can perform: The characters seem to have lives that extend beyond the frame of the stage. You may leave the play, which is having its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, with some questions about the people you have just spent two hours being riveted by. But about one thing there is no question: Playwright Richard Greenberg writes like a dream.

Next-door on the main stage, Greenberg’s funny but shallow adaptation of Marivaux’s “Triumph of Love” offers some of the pleasure of his sharp wit. But in the smaller theater, the playwright paints with a finer brush, and on his own canvas.

He tells the story of three estranged childhood friends. Walker (John Slattery) is a brooder, and as wickedly funny as the bitter can be. On the road for three years, he has managed to miss his father’s funeral, for which his sister Nan (Patricia Clarkson) would like to wring his neck. She’s the stable one, married with kids, and she’s been taking care of their institutionalized mother. “She’s like Zelda Fitzgerald’s less stable sister,” says Nan, who explains why their mother also missed the funeral: “She can’t be there--she’s [eloquent pause] elsewhere.”

*

The dead man was an architect who, along with a partner, designed “all of the most famous buildings in the last 30 years,” including a house renowned for its livability, its fluid rooms and changing light. Walker has his heart set on that now-empty house, as a panacea for all that’s gone wrong in his life. The siblings have come together to hear the will and collect their inheritance.

Joining them is their childhood friend Pip (Jon Tenney), the son of Theo, their father’s partner. Much to Walker’s disdain, Pip is a soap-opera star. On TV, he is called Butte, goes shirtless and is carnally involved with a character named Savannah (like God, Greenberg is in the details). Pip must defend himself against Walker’s scorn as all easygoing people must defend themselves against the unhappy intelligent: “Being in a good mood is not the same as being a moron,” he instructs Walker.

These three become embroiled in a struggle over their heritage, over what their parents left them and why. Then, to illustrate just how little we guess correctly about the past, Greenberg takes us from 1995 to 1960 in the second act, to the time just before these characters were conceived. The actors take on the roles of their former characters’ parents--their antecedents--playing out another triangle in the same Manhattan apartment.

There we learn a great deal that Walker, Nan and Pip don’t know about their parents. We get a sense most particularly of why Walker is the maimed bird he is.

But the answers supplied by the playwright are maddeningly elliptical; we never learn why the parents are maimed themselves, or for that matter what happens in the intervening years between the two acts. The mysteries are intentional. This is not Pip’s soap opera. We can’t know everything, and Greenberg acknowledges that quite smartly.

As good as this play is--and it’s world-class--Greenberg may not yet be finished with it. The function of a fourth character (played by Julia Pearlstein) is not fully realized. And when the play ends--on a gorgeous line, as it happens--it hits a strangely unfinished chord, like a line of music ending two notes before the top of the arpeggio. While Greenberg is right not to explain everything, he still needs some semblance of finality, so that the audience knows for sure the play is over at its end.

*

The cast is superb under Evan Yionoulis’ sure-handed direction. Clarkson, a seasoned Greenberg hand, is brilliant in the second act; she gets the despair lying just under the wit, the tenderness behind the polish. Slattery is excellent as the hostile son and as the disconnected father. Tenney is very funny as Pip, whose excitable theory about Sophoclean drama is one of the comic highlights of the play (it also has surprising resonance in Act 2). As Theo, Pip’s father, Tenney offers a wildness, a tortured charisma the son would throw off as vestigial.

Christopher Barreca’s set, a barren Greenwich Village apartment in the first act, a lived-in artist’s garret for the second, is beautifully understated and features the fortuitous rain of the title.

Greenberg infuses the bygone days of Greenwich Village with a greater intensity than the more barren contemporary scenes, but he threads both acts together beautifully--with a sense of the precariousness of human happiness, even amid all the intelligence and talent in the world. Even with its inconclusive finish, this play is a major achievement for Greenberg and for South Coast Rep. “Three Days of Rain” should not be missed by anyone who cares about the theater.

* “Three Days of Rain,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends April 6. $26-$39. (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

John Slattery: Walker/Ned

Patricia Clarkson: Nan/Lina

Jon Tenney: Pip/Theo

Julia Pearlstein: Pia

A South Coast Repertory production. By Richard Greenberg. Directed by Evan Yionoulis. Sets Christopher Barreca. Costumes Candice Cain. Lights Donald Holder. Sound Garth Hemphill. Wigs Carol F. Doran. Production manager Michael Mora. Stage manager Randall K. Lum.