New Yorkers drown in despair, talk up a storm

By Lise Clavel

Ironically, conversation plays the largest role in Three Days of Rain, in which the characters' insistence on having "absolutely nothing to say" reveals itself to be a shelter from dangerous knowledge about the past. The portrayal in this performance of several neurotic-but-vulnerable adults sets up an obvious background for the story of how they got to where they are‹or rather how they didn't get there at all. The explanation for the failings of their present life, conveyed through the grudges and secrets of interwoven relationships, engenders sympathy for all the characters and their differing perspectives on the previous generation. What drives the plot, besides a New York rainstorm, is each character's poignant attempt to understand himself through the people who have affected him, where they have lived, and what their secrets are.

KATHERINE ALDRICH/YH Still raining, still dreaming.

The play opens on Walter (Ed Roggenkamp, DC '00) curled up on a bare mattress in a downtown loft space, mumbling himself awake. His first clear phrase is "story of a moment." This moment is kept hidden until the end, and in some ways can be seen as the structuring vehicle of six people's lives. Dressed in a ratty old sweater and jeans, Walter paces the apartment, waiting for his sister to pick him up for the appointment with a lawyer about their father's will. Nan (Shira Milikowky, DC '03) arrives a few minutes before Pip (Ben Marcovitz, TC '02), and in that time she promises Walter that she will give him the inherited glass house that their father, Ned, built—but with one condition: he must promise never to look at his father's journal again. She's asking him to trade memories for the future. He agrees, but grabs the notebook anyway on the way out.

Walter's obsession with figuring out the past is infectious. By the end of the first act, in which Pip, a mere family friend, has inherited the house instead of Ned's children, the characters engage in a screaming fight about what happened three decades ago. Just as Pip reveals an old flame, Walter changes his mind about wanting information and sets the journal on fire. "Now we'll never know anything!" Pip yells, and the present day is over; after intermission the same actors return, except now it's 1960 and the apartment is brighter.

"Things are so much better before they actually begin," Ned (also played by Roggenkamp) tells us. Perhaps in the first images of this architect's clean workspace, the dark is waiting for the work to start before it settles down on everyone's life and threatens "the beginning of error." Error is not in the acting, however, as Roggenkamp transforms from the mumbling, manic Walter to the stuttering, childlike Ned who, at one point, has to remind Pip that "this isn't Of Mice and Men." However similar mania and stuttering may sound, the characters are completely different, and Roggenkamp makes his transition so smoothly and plausibly that it calls to mind the symptoms of multiple personality disorder. Milikowsky has acquired a Southern accent, and her conversion from an apathetic New Yorker to the ignorant but caring Lina brings her into the limelight. No longer a supporting character or even a supporting companion of Theo, the boyfriend distracted by his thwarted plans of a glass house, she deftly prods Ned to speak more fluently in both words and emotions.

Theater

Three Days of Rain Produced by Meredith Engelson Directed by Meiyin Wang Fri., Mar. 24, 7 and 10 p.m.; Sat., Mar. 25, 8 p.m. Whitney Humanities Center Gym

Ned's metamorphosis from an awkward host into a suave lover lying around in his pajamas occurs both unpredictably and believably, thanks to the fine-tuned communication between Roggenkamp and Milikowsky. And as for the excluded, soaked, failed, and almost-forgotten Theo, his presence as both a sympathetic and hateful character shines through in Marcovitz's acting, which itself is neither failed nor forgettable. His return from seclusion and his frantic admission that "I can't do the job" rains on the happy moment between Lina and Ned. Theo's disruption is the feared beginning, perhaps, which makes silence seem better than words, memories better than reality, and blueprints better than houses.

The play's inverted chronology highlights the irreparable despair of the characters. What Greenberg shows is that the audience, the objective though fictional observer, can work through the problems in each relationship even though the characters themselves have no idea how to escape "so much pain." We sit at a privileged distance, watching as these inhabitants of a glass house that is both proverbial and literal slowly try to teach themselves that "there isn't any secret—just gestures, whims, energy, personality." Luckily, the audience isn't taken in by Ned's defeatist point of view—we see these qualities from the opening scene, where, for once, things do get better after they actually begin.

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