Throughout winter break, many Washington University students and staff had the opportunity to spend time with their relatives, most notably their immediate families. In spite of loved ones lost throughout the year, for many students the return home is accompanied by bickering siblings, home cooking and the generation gap between children and parents. These midwinter reflections are a perfect backdrop for the January 17th opening of Three Days of Rain, a drama that explores the misconceptions children can develop about their parents. Three Days of Rain was playwright Richard Greenberg’s 1998 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and is directed by fifth year senior and performing arts major Eddie Kurtz.

Kurtz is breaking some PAD ground, as the first student in nearly eight years to direct a show outside of the A.E. Hotchner award winners and All Student Theatre. Kurtz explains that he discovered Three Days of Rain while looking for a monologue, and was drawn to the rich and “extremely well-written” material. Three Days of Rain hinges on an interesting concept: three actors each play two different roles in a play that works in two pieces. The first half deals with the lives of three children, as two siblings, Walker (junior Charlie Olson) and Nan (graduate student Kerry Mulvaney) meet after their architect father Ned’s death, only to find that the father has willed his masterpiece to Walker’s close friend Pip (sophomore Jared Macke). The second half of the story focuses on the past, where young Ned is played by Olson, Theo, Pip’s father, is played by Macke, and Walker and Nan’s mother Lina is played by Mulvaney. It’s a complicated case of fathers being played by their sons, and it works in reverse chronological order.

The title Three Days of Rain comes from a line from Ned’s secret journal, which the second generation finds and hope will be a Rosetta Stone to their father, only to read such bland opening entries as “three days of rain.” Kurtz explains that the play is an excellent exploration of the question-how well do we really know our parents? For many people, trying to understand their parents as having once shared the same youth and conflicts as they do is an age old problem-but Greenberg’s play, Kurtz clarifies, deals with the situation in an original and engaging way. Not only is there the interesting perspective of seeing a son play his father, but there is also a vast difference in the tone and feel of the two separate acts, which only becomes a cohesive whole after both have been seen.

Kurtz notes that one “should pay attention. There is a lot that is mentioned in the first half of the play that only becomes important in the second act, and vice-versa.” Although Kurtz advises his audience to focus on the interweaving characters, he also praises the show’s humor, which he describes as “intelligent, ironic, and sometimes in surprising places,” so that even in very tense scenes, Greenburg will have a character say something amusing.

“This play is basically a tragedy of familial miscommunication,” Kurtz explains. There are children who draw completely false assumptions about their parents, and then use these assumptions to make peace with themselves. This draws on issues about the nature of truth in relationships, and as Kurtz puts it, “strikes a note,” about the nature of making peace, and the worth of peace achieved through false ideas.

Three Days of Rain has drawn strong responses from its players. Olson, who portrays the major dichotomy of father/son Ned/Walker, admits that he “loves this play. It’s been ten weeks, and I’m still discovering things within it and discussing them with my friends.” Mulvaney, who plays the two female roles, enjoys that the show is an “intimate family portrait, about the immediate family unit.” Macke, who also balances a father/son pair with Theo/Pip, has enjoyed the challenge of developing two separate characters simultaneously, where “what one does with one [character] is the complete extreme of the other.” So as Washington University students and staff transition back from home to school mode, they can experience the extremes of Three Days of Rain starting January 17th.

When: 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Jan. 17 and 18; at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Saturday, Jan. 19; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 20.

Where: A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, Mallinckrodt Student Center

How Much: $12 for the general public and $8 for senior citizens and Washington University faculty, staff and students

Popularity: 1% [?]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2002 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.