Three Days of Rain
By Richard Greenberg. Directed by Charles Towers. Set design by Bill Clarke. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by David Lander. With Dean Harrison, Judith Lightfoot Clarke, and Kyle Fabel. At Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, through November 17.

" This is the day, Nan. We’re finally going to find out what belongs to us, " Walker Janeway says weightily to his sister as they head off to a reading of their architectural-giant father’s will in Three Days of Rain. He is talking about more than material inheritance, however, having just stumbled on a cryptic journal kept by the famously silent father in a secret dive of a Manhattan apartment that had been his and his architectural partner’s studio in the earliest days of their fabled collaboration. The point of Richard Greenberg’s well-crafted puzzle of a play is that, though we are handed our emotional baggage and think we have thoroughly investigated its contents, the past that formed us is not fully knowable.

Three Days of Rain — which takes its title from the conveniently discovered journal’s first entry — was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. It’s an ingenious construct, nicely assembled at Merrimack Repertory Theatre under new artistic director Charles Towers’s supervision (the play’s 1999 Boston premiere was at SpeakEasy Stage). In act one, which is set in 1995, Walker, Nan, and their father’s partner’s son, Pip, pick through old resentments and new revelations in an effort to understand their tangled legacy. Then in act two, which is set in the same apartment in 1960, the same three actors play Nan and Walker’s parents and Pip’s father at a time when the sands of their interrelationship, personal and professional, shifted. The image is evoked of original sin, " the beginning of error. " But the seeds are not what the inheritors, having grown out of them, imagine them to be.

Greenberg, whose adaptation of August Strindberg’s Dance of Death recently opened on Broadway, deals here with another doomed coupling. As Walker, rising from a ratty mattress in the abandoned apartment, tells us at the beginning, " My father was more-or-less silent; my mother was more-or-less mad. They married because by 1960 they had reached a certain age and they were the only ones left in the room. " That turns out not to be quite true, but mother Lina, a compulsively verbal if perceptive Southern bohemian likened to " Zelda Fitzgerald’s less stable sister, " was not the ideal match for father Ned, a tongue-tied visionary whose coded innermost thoughts read to his wounded son like " a fucking weather report! "

Neither was the relationship of the architectural partners, one of whom died young, what the adult children perceive it to be — or what the men themselves pre-conceived it to be. It is one of the play’s ironies, given the imperviousness of the past, that the reputation of the partners was built on a Long Island residence, the apparently iconic Janeway House, that is a masterpiece of fenestration and light.

Greenberg’s characters tend to be articulate, sophisticated, and witty — as they are in Three Days of Rain. And he’s big on metaphor — be it architectural, Oedipal, or name-based. Pip, obviously, is associated with Dickens’s Great Expectations, though the happy-go-lucky soap-opera hunk who here bears the name would seem to have few expectations apart from the good, shallow life he carves for himself. Unhappy Walker, who has just shown back up in New York after a long, incomunicado absence, takes his name from his father’s fantasy ambition, articulated in the second act, to be a flâneur, a wanderer whose " life has no pattern . . . just traffic . . . and no hope. " Nan, well, Boston mom Nan is unaccountably normal if droll, and, in Judith Lightfoot Clarke’s knowing reading, possessed of a sly deadpan in which there is just a hint of her troubled mother’s Southern slink.

The Merrimack production is solidly acted, with Dean Harrison bringing to lost-boy Walker an ironic armor, a squint-eyed intensity, and a badgering compulsion. And the parallels he draws between word-wielding Walker and his yearning, stuttering dad are touching. Kyle Fabel makes a case for the amiable if inconsequential Pip, and as the more driven, if no more gifted, Theo, he’s empathetic if not likable. As Lina, Clarke, though saddled with a dress no architect of any era would date a girl in, dapples brainy Southern affectation with desperation. Set designer Bill Clarke conjures a suitably grimy apartment, then brightens it into an authentic-looking early-’60s architectural haven on the cheap. Only the play’s title effect is disappointing, the rain heard but, despite a looming skylight, not seen.

Issue Date: November 1-8, 2001