"...often dynamic, often tender acting"

July 21, 2002 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Three Days of Rain, a play that the New York Times described as “a puzzle in two acts,” is having an interesting run at the Miniature Theatre of Chester (through August 4).

Its mysteries are enhanced, but complicated, by the device of having a group of three actors, Michael W. Connors, Patricia Marie Kelley, and Jason MacDonald each playing a grown child in Act I and then in Act II playing their own parents in events that occurred years before.

The children, Walker, Nan, and Pip, in Act I are in their thirties and have gathered in an almost empty and sadly neglected loft in Manhattan, a loft which 35 years before their fathers, Ned and Theo, struggling young architects, rented, but which eventually Ned bought.

The children have met there for a belated reading of Ned’s will. (Theo, father of Pip having died many years previously.) Walker, who has been neurotically on the run, has missed the funeral but has showed up to aggressively complicate everything. He seems temporarily homeless and is bunking in the loft.

He is upset by the will which gives to Pip, son of his father’s partner, the Lunar House on Long Island, an edifice built early in the partnership of the fathers. And he is even more upset by a journal he has found under the mattress in the loft - a very spare journal in which entries such as: 'April 3-5, three days of rain,' puzzle and infuriate him.

Act II will give us those three days of rain and the events that occurred, very different ones from what the children suppose them to have been.

All three actors are skillful and effective. Connors as Walker, a son who always felt his father did not like him, and as Ned, the father who indeed did not especially like children, gives us two very different characters in the angry neurotic son and the gifted but shy, stammering future father who will never converse or bond with his son.

Kelley, Ned’s daughter, has made a life for herself in Boston where she is raising a couple of pre-school children. She seems an adjusted and attempting peace-maker in the first act. As Lisa in the second act her role is more demanding as she gives three days support and confidence to Ned, thus changing everyone’s lives and expectations. She handles this in a winning and appealing manner.

As Pip and Theo, MacDonald has smaller roles but makes them different and dynamic. His delivery is rapid-fire. His demeanor as Pip, successful TV performer, is self-depreciating but self-content. He will gladly give the Lunar House to Walter, or let him buy it if that would make Walter happier, since the success of the firm has made the inheritance a substantial one for all three heirs.. As Theo, he is convincing as the frustrated loser, in several senses of the word.

This is a complicated play. The main themes concern parent/child relationships (or lack of them) and sibling rivalry and misunderstanding. However themes of guilt, of artistic creation and of unacknowledged debt must also be sorted out.

The children in Act I will never understand the elders in Act II, and at times the play seemed over-complicated, especially in Act II in which the pace lagged, making the act seem over-long.

Structurally the reverse order of the acts is dynamic. However, the direct-to-audience narrator approach at times seems intrusive, and one wishes the playwright could have structured his script without them.

However, the issues addressed in this play and the often dynamic, often tender acting of the three actors held and involved the audience as was apparent in the after-play discussion at the Sunday performance for which a large portion of the audience remained and took a lively part.