If you go
‘Three Days of Rain’
Where: 1st Stage, 1524 Spring Hill Road, McLean
When: 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; through Nov. 22
Info: $25, $15 students; 703-854-1856; 1ststagespringhill.org
“Three Days of Rain,” at 1st Stage, is a brainteaser, toying with how the past affects the present and how people focusing on the present misapprehend the past. In the hands of a less imaginative playwright, it would be just another dysfunctional-family play, but “Three Days of Rain” is by Richard Greenberg, and he likes his audiences to hear poetry, think and wonder.
Greenberg begins by reversing chronology. Act I takes place in a Lower Manhattan loft in 1995, where three people (Walker, Nan and Pip) meet to hear the reading of a will. Act II takes place in the same loft in 1960, where the parents of Walker, Nan and Pip are young adults. Three actors play all six roles.
Walker (Lucas Beck) is brilliant but tormented. He and his sister, Nan (Belen Pifel), are children of a famous architect, Ned. Pip (Brian Razzino) is the son of their father’s business partner, Theo. Pip is Walker’s polar opposite, a rich soap opera star and the epitome of superficiality.
There’s a great deal of exposition in the first act, and Greenberg’s speech patterns aren’t easy. Beck is the only one who gets the poetry right in Act I. But in Act II, where the action steps back a generation and the characters become Ned (Beck), his wife, Lina (Pifel), and Theo (Razzino), director Dawn McAndrews snaps her production into clearer focus.
Ned, who had previously been described simply as “quiet,” turns out to have a serious stutter. Beck artfully makes his character blossom. Pifel, who was bland as Nan, is electrifying as Lina, a garrulous Southern belle. Razzino is smooth as the handsome, remote Theo.
What’s ostensibly at stake in “Three Days of Rain” is the future of a famous house designed by Ned and Theo’s firm. But Greenberg’s real questions are about the people who lived in the house (Ned and Lina), Theo’s relationship to them and what it took to design that house. This “Three Days of Rain” faithfully reproduces the way Greenberg answers some of those tantalizing questions and deliberately leaves the rest unanswered.
