Three Days of Rain
For better and worse, Greenberg is an old-fashioned playwright, a wit who might have been more at home during Broadway’s heyday, trading gibes with Philip Barry or Cole Porter. His plays–glib, romantic, and balanced–speak with the voice of one weaned on Arthur Miller, Maxwell Anderson, and the New Yorker of long ago. To see a Greenberg play is to be nostalgically transported to a time of opening-night parties in swank Upper East Side apartments where women in sequined gowns sipped martinis while lolling against a grand piano. And though Greenberg has addressed the present as well as the past, he usually skips the tumult of the 60s. Since his first major success in the 80s–the rather mechanically topical Eastern Standard–he’s penned a new libretto for Pal Joey and explored the lives of a quartet of characters in 1959 in his moving 1992 play The American Plan.
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The second act, set in 1960, also begins on a strident note but soon settles into a mood of melancholy, nostalgia, and remorse. Set during the three days of rain that inspired Ned Janeway’s first journal entry, it features him, Pip’s father–the ferocious, conceited Theo–and Theo’s girlfriend Lina, who spends a crucial evening with Ned.
