The Observer
7 March 1999		 From the Friends of Firth Collection
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Sainsbury's Magazine

When an actress of the calibre of Elizabeth McGovern describes the "unexpected magic" of a play  as being unique in her experience, one takes note.  The subject of her enthusiasm is Three days of Rain, by Richard Greenberg, which enjoyed a sell-out run at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent 
Garden in March.  So spectacular was its success that it returns with the same cast to straddle two millenia from 9 November.

"It was supposed to be just small-scale workshop," says Ms. McGovern.  "Yet in rehearsal three actors who had never worked together before began to realize there was something very special.  We knew we loved it, but weren't sure what the audience reaction would be."

What greeted Ms. McGovern and co-stars David Morrissey and Colin Firth (pictured above with McGovern) were ecstatic reviews and a box-office stampede that surprised everyone.

The play begins in present-day New York: the children and a friend of a deceased architect are about to learn the contents of the man's will.  The action then leaps back to 1960, to the fledgling architect, his wife and friend and the secret behind a diary entry concerning a three-day downpour.

"It's about children and parents and the way we establish our own identities," says McGovern.  "I wanted to do it again because it was such a pleasure.  Not only that, I get to play two parts, daughter and mother!"

--Bill Hagerty


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Evening Standard
Hot Tickets
November 18, 1999

THREE DAYS OF RAIN  **  (** = excellent) 
by Richard Greenberg.  Dir. Robin Lefevre. 
With Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern, David Morrissey.

Speedy revival for Richard Greenberg's fascinating and poignant time play that shows how our parent's lives and decisions dramatically shape our own existence.  Three young adults are reunited in Nineties Manhattan and in the second act the action jumps back to the hopeful Sixties, where you see their parents caught in a triangle.  Colin Firth, first dressed in valiantly worn dejection and then as his stammering father, gives one of the three best male performances this year.

--Nicholas De Jongh

© Copyright of The Evening Standard 1999
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Evening Standard,   November 8, 1999

Taking a Fresh View Across the Pond 
by Matt Wolf 

If one were to judge America solely on the plays from across the Atlantic that are well received in Britain, one could be forgiven for thinking it consisted of little more than trailer-park trash who peak mostly in monosyllables. Or so such erstwhile London successes as Tracy Lett’s Killer Joe and Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living, among many others, have suggested. 

It’s against that perception—a view of the States guaranteed to leave British audiences feeling superior—that one especially welcomes the return to the Donmar Warehouse this week of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain. 

Greenberg’s play was first seen in London last March as the runaway hit of the Donmar’s three-play American Imports season, with the same performers (Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern and David Morrissey) who are reteaming for this extended run. In context, it’s almost as if Greenberg’s play contains specific rebuttals to the criticisms levelled against American plays abroad. You want irony? Three Days of Rain is fuelled by a central irony that won’t be revealed here, along with a prevailing loquaciousness at odds with the heightened inarticulacy of, say, Sam Shepard and David Mamet. 

Nor does he trade in the TV movie-of-the-week teariness that raises British hackles. ‘That’s sentimental,’ snaps budding architect Firth to McGovern, his bride-to-be, at one point as if to squash any such tendencies in the play itself. It is little surprise, then, that Greenberg tends to be compared to droll American satirists of a bygone era such as Philip Barry (The Philadelphia Story) more than he does to his own generation. 

He’s a dramatist out of time whose play deals teasingly with time. (Firth and McGovern play an estranged brother and sister in Act One, and their own parents 35 years earlier in Act Two.) The result looks set to be the first international success for Greenberg, 41, who has so far written 12 plays. In 1988, he became the overnight darling of then-New York Times critic Frank Rich with a play Eastern Standard, that was regarded as a defining expos of Yuppie values. 

This summer saw the New York premiere of arguably his most personal play—a black comedy, Hurrah at Last, about a writer seemingly struck down with an Aids-like disease. Much the same happened to Greenberg several years ago; he turned out to have what the play describes as a ‘curable cancer’. 

The next one, due to open off Broadway next year, may make the boldest statement yet about his burgeoning reputation: its title, quite simply, is The Dazzle.
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Financial Times 
  
March 11, 1999 

review by Sarah Hemming) 

We have seen plenty of new American plays about the grim underbelly of US society, so it is quite refreshing to watch Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain. This witty and thoughtful play, beautifully staged by Robin Lefevre as part of the American Imports season at the Donmar Warehouse, deals with middle-claas neurosis and family feuds. A tale of the tensions and bonds between two generations of two families, it is peppered with knowing, urbane wit—enjoyably, if sometimes slightly smugly so. But it also mulls on the nature of inheritance and the peril of interpreting the past. 

We begin in 1990s New York. A famous architect has just died and his adult son and daughter, Walker and Nan, together with Pip, the son of the architect’s partner, have been summoned to find out what he has left them. Of most interest is the innovative glass house that made his name. But there are tensions in the air. Nan is furious at Walker, a fabulously self-obsessed individual. Walker (Colin Firth) in splendid, Byronic mode) is mad at his father for all manner of things, but chiefly for being his father. Finally, he puts this fact together with a revelation in his father’s journal and jumps to a conclusion about his father’s life. 

But his interpretation of events is wrong, as we discover when, in Act 2, we are spirited back to 1960 and the previous generation. Here we learn the truth about Walker’s mother and father, the truth about the genesis of the house, and truth behind the clipped phrases in the journal. The first act is full of fireworks, but it is here that Greenberg suggests his mettle as a writer. The scene between the young Ned and Lina, thrown together by three days of rain, is evocative and tender, and tinged with poignancy for the audience. 

Lefevre’s production does the play proud, with the three actors giving excellent performances. Colin Firth contrasts movingly the willful, implacable misery of the son with the watchfulness of his shy, stuttering father. Elizabeth McGovern has the father’s watchfulness, as the daughter Nan, and also the lovely, mercurial quality of her mother. David Morrissey as Pip has the superficial self-assurances of his father, but also a generosity that offsets it. Pip is a delightful character, a nice man who refuses to be browbeaten by the prevailing notion that to be clever or sensitive you have to be miserable, and Morrissey gives a lovely performance. An elegant, bittersweet play that offers a lesson in perspective—and not just of the architectural kind. 
 
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