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MORE ON 'Three Days of Rain'

Enough Said About 'Three Days of Rain.' Let's Talk Julia Roberts!

Published: April 20, 2006

In Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain," the existential enigmas and conundrums of faith that always pepper this playwright's work assume a tantalizingly dichotomous form that. ... Excuse me, I was talking. What? How is she? How's who? Oh, her. O.K., if you must know, she's stiff with self-consciousness (especially in the first act), only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays and so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don't want to let her out of your sight. Now can we go back to discussing Mr. Greenberg's play?

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Joan Marcus

Julia Roberts makes her big-time theatrical debut in a revival of "Three Days of Rain."

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Joan Marcus

Paul Rudd and Julia Roberts in "Three Days of Rain."

Fat chance. One of the three stars of the Broadway revival of "Three Days of Rain," which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, is Julia Roberts, who is making her big-time theatrical debut. And though Ms. Roberts gives a genuinely humble performance, there is no way that this show is not going to be all about Julia.

Ms. Roberts is the sole reason this limited-run revival, which ends on June 18, has become the most coveted ticket in town. Mr. Greenberg's slender, elegant play from 1997 about familial disconnectedness and the loneliness of intimacy has certainly never known — and probably will never know again — such fame and fortune. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to discern its artistic virtues from this wooden and splintered interpretation, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring (poor, luckless lunkheads) Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper.

The only emotion that this production generates arises not from any interaction onstage, but from the relationship between Ms. Roberts and her fans. And before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars — and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930's — to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades.

Lord knows, she isn't a versatile film actress in the style of her rivals from abroad, Nicole and Kate and Cate. Her range onscreen runs from feisty but vulnerable ("Pretty Woman," "Erin Brockovich") to vulnerable but feisty ("Sleeping With the Enemy," "Closer"). Her strength, as far as her public is concerned, is in her sameness, which magnifies everyday human traits to a level of radioactive intensity, and a feral beauty that is too unusual to be called pretty.

Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.

This probably accounts for my feeling so nervous when I arrived at the theater, as if a relative or a close friend were about to do something foolish in public. I don't think I was the only one who felt that way in the audience, which had the highest proportion of young women (from teenagers to those in their early 40's) of any show I've attended. There was a precurtain tension in the house that had little of the schadenfreude commonly evoked by big celebrities testing their stage legs. We all wanted our Julia to do well.

That she does not do well — at least not by any conventional standards of theatrical art — is unlikely to lose Ms. Roberts any fans, though it definitely won't win her any new ones among drama snobs. Your heart goes out to her when she makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost, as if to move too much might invite falling.

Sometimes she plants one hand on a hip, then varies the pose by doing the same on the other side. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second.

Unfortunately it's in the second act that Ms. Roberts plays the character who is always on the verge of a breakdown, and in this part she's comparatively relaxed, perhaps because she has a slipping Southern accent to hide behind. In the first act she's supposed to be the normal one.

I suppose I had better give you some plot here. (Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.) In the first act of "Three Days of Rain," set in 1995, the hopelessly neurotic ne'er-do-well, Walker (Mr. Rudd); his disapproving and domestic sister, Nan (Ms. Roberts); and their longtime friend, Pip (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy actor, come together for the reading of the will of Walker and Nan's father, an architect of legendary status whose partner was the now long-deceased father of Pip.

In the second act, which takes place in 1960, the same performers play the parents of their first-act characters: Ned (Mr. Rudd), the quiet one (and father-to-be to Nan and Walker), and Lina (Ms. Roberts), a mad and madcap Zelda Fitzgerald type, who when we meet her is going out with Theo (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy architect. Both acts are set in a loft in downtown Manhattan, the apartment shared in 1960 by Theo and Ned. (Santo Loquasto's set, enhanced by a nifty stage-wetting rainstorm, has spot-on authenticity; his costumes for Ms. Roberts don't really match her roles, but then neither does she.)

Average Reader Rating      (2.56 stars, 111 votes)

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It Also Stars Rudd and Cooper, April 20, 2006

Reviewer: nyugaylynn

It's too bad that Julia Roberts has been the center of all the attention. I went to see Three Days of Rain not because Julia Roberts was in it (I'm not a fan), but because Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper were in it. In my opinion, these two guys save the show from being an utter failure. Julia Roberts's performance is lackluster at best. Rudd doesn't impress until the second half. His portrayal of Walker is a little over-the-top. Walker is a little too disturbed, a little too angst-ridden, a little too much. Cooper, however, is like a ray of light in the darkness. He perks up the first act and is darling in the second. If only Rudd and Cooper had a better Nan/Lina off whom they could play. That said, Julia isn't terrible, but this play clearly stars Rudd and Cooper.
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