Title:  THREE DAYS OF RAIN.(Review) 
   Author:  MATT WOLF 
 

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Cahners Publishing Company 

(DRAMA; DONMAR WAREHOUSE; 251 SEATS; 15 [pounds sterling] ($25) TOP) 

LONDON A Donmar Warehouse presentation of a play in two acts by Richard Greenberg.  

Directed by Robin Lefevre. Sets and costumes, Tom Piper; lighting, David Plater; sound, Rob Tory. Opened, reviewed March 2, 1999. 

Running time: 2 HOURS, 20 MIN. 

It's not just the insistence on inclement weather (not to mention a crucial figure's emotional repression) that gives American dramatist Richard Greenberg's play a particular kick in London. Greenberg upends the parent-child agon, turning an age-old dramatic template into a generational detective story, just as he skillfully deflects perceptions of sentimentality by having a budding architect quickly scotch such tendencies ("that's sentimental," the character snaps) in his newly smitten bride-to-be. The result bodes well for a prolonged life for the last of three brief runs in the Donmar Warehouse's American Imports season, even if the male actors' accents are so (sometimes) comically wide of the mark that one has to separate out their shrewd character investigation from some mighty strange sounds. English audiences, it has to be said, are unlikely to care, given the local popularity of both Colin Firth, playing a garrulous gay drifter and then his lovesick stammerer of a father, and David Morrissey (now on screen in "Hilary and Jackie") as -- at various times -- a rival, friend and colleague to the two utterly contrasting generations of father and son offered up by Firth. 

By now, the play's conceit is well-known. A semi-estranged brother and sister come together in act one following a family death only to draw conclusions about their parents (dad, in particular) that are movingly disproved once the action reverses 35 years to 1960 New York in the second act. Unlikely to pass unremarked in England is the pivot of the play around a centralirony: the assumption that the journal entry from which the play takes its title, "three days of rain," was a sign of parental evasion, whereas in truth it was a shorthand for a rare moment of sun between two young lovers before their lives went sour. The birth of a father's love, in other words, only fuels the hatred of a son who mistakes a discovery of bliss for "a fucking weather report." Greenberg has always located the blight beneath his characters' well-spoken badinage, and so he does again here, cannily folding a play about emotional bequest into an intricate tale that depends for one of its key plot points on a literal bequest. But "Three Days of Rain" is never ultimately as poignant as it wants to be, for all the sparkle and savvy of a writer who --line for line -- remains one of America's sharpest. 

While the second act fizzes with reverberant emotions that make one want to replay the first half alongside it, there's a patness about Greenberg's resolution, however suspenseful the author's juxtaposition of then-vs.-now. It's as if he were working from some invisible diagram rather than animating from within his two triangular scenarios. The inconclusive affect doesn't in anyway diminish one's appreciation of Greenberg's linguistic finesse, but it may account for the play's failure so far to catch commercial fire. 

Robin Lefevre's London version could be a wholly different matter, simply because of some genuine marquee names who may (for exactly that reason) be difficult to contract for a longer run. A household name in Britain since the BBC "Pride and Prejudice," Firth is an always game occupant of a  pair of roles that he only really suits in act two, once he drops Walker's edgy, incessant bark to monitor the ellipses of the same man's bespectacled architect father. 

Similarly, Morrissey brings to his (smaller) roles impressive energy and drive, even if his accent and posture are at vaguely loutish odds with (in act one, anyway) a supposed thespian pretty boy who makes light of his life as a much-worshiped mediocrity. 

The real discovery is Elizabeth McGovern as Walker's aggrieved sister, Nan, and her incipiently alcoholic mother, Lina, who has the dubious distinction (or so her children see it) of being a Zelda Fitzgerald wannabe. It's mildly amusing to hear McGovern, now an American expatriate in London, put an English spin on words like "recovery," just as it's astonishing to witness the continued growth of a onetime Oscar nominee who has gained enormously in confidence and charm since her days as a Hollywood soubrette. It's Lina's blight to be saved and damned at once, but it's part of McGovern's ongoing resurrection that her work as "a very intriguing alcoholic" has made her a very intriguing actress. 

© Copyright of Variety