By Harry Haun
20 Apr 2006

Julia Roberts; Bradley Cooper; Paul Rudd; Joe Mantello; Richard Greenberg; Terrence McNally; Lynn Nottage; William Finn; Susan Sarandon; Cameron Mackintosh; Tovah Feldshuh; George C. Wolfe; Rosie Perez and Norbert Leo Butz.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

Three Days of Rain came on like three rings of circus April 19 when it bowed on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. There was the intense, tumultuous pre-show commotion, played out before a rowdy DeMillian multitude waving autograph books and wielding Instamatics at the celebs on parade. That was followed by the becalming show itself. And then came the post-show winddown at the chic Cipriani on West 23rd Street.

“It’s such a quiet play and such a noisy event,” observed the author of the evening, Richard Greenberg. “It’s sort of a cerebral, subtle play, with the biggest star in the world.”

Said another way: “It’s insane, but it’s great insane”—this from the only one of the cast of three with prior Broadway experience: Paul Rudd, who was sufficiently saucer-eyed.

These gentlemen do not exaggerate. It was Event Broadway at its most italic and emphatic. Checking her Oscar at the door and muzzling that enigmatic smile, Julia Roberts gamely decided to work without a camera or a net and stepped on a stage.

Although both of her parents came from theatre, she honed her art in Hollywood with intimate camera acting and only now is getting around to Broadway where big is better—a tough thing to learn at age 38. That she would even bother at these prices says something positive about her determination to prove herself with new challenges.

But she didn’t make this sharp right turn to the stage for the past or for her parents. “It was more present,” she admitted, leaning against a pillar in the Cipriani’s main dining room, looking like a girl who had just given her all at the office. “I mean, Mom’s going to come to see it, and I hope she will like it, but I think it’s more about the here and the now.”

Well, speaking of the here and the now, what about those throngs of admirers outsider her stage door night after night? (The fans seemed to be out in full-force on opening night, but Roberts’ publicist, Marcy Engelman, said they were only half-full, that the crowds have been enormous.) How does a girl stay focused amid such staggering distractions?

Roberts smiled The Smile and admitted she didn’t know how she did it—more priorities, she imagined, than powers of concentration. “All of a sudden, there wasn’t an awareness, especially since we were working so hard. We were in that theatre so much. I had a very limited awareness of what was going on outside of my house or the theatre. Really.”

Even a Tony-winning veteran like Joe Mantello was rattled by the racket attending Roberts’ arrival on Broadway. “The hardest thing about directing this,” he said, “was, once we moved into the theatre, the kind of noise outside—both literal and metaphorical noise. When we rehearsed the play, it was a really normal rehearsal process. Then—I remember thinking at the first preview, ‘Oh, right. It’s Julia Roberts.' I had kinda forgotten about that during the four weeks that we had had together rehearsing the play.”

Bernard Telsey, who cast the play, gives Mantello credit for coming up with Bradley Cooper , a wholly untested Broadway commodity, for the third member of the cast. “I’ve known Bradley for a few years because some of my friends are on ‘Alias,’” said Mantello, meaning actor Ron Rifkin for one and writer Jon Robin Baitz for two. “They live in the same apartment complex, so I was aware of him and I thought he’d be terrific for this.”

Cooper, who is as well-known for Fox’s “Kitchen Confidential” as he is for “Alias,” makes the most of his main chance on the Main Stem. It’s the performance of someone solidly establishing his beachhead on Broadway, and the effort was showing when he arrived at the party with his sister, Holly. “It has been quite an experience,” he understated wearily, “but now that we’ve started, I think, I’ll have a lot more fun.”

CAA kingpin George Lane laughed when asked his favorite client in Three Days of Rain —he represents Mantello, Greenberg and Roberts—and, in truth, is the sly, shy, silent architect of this whole enterprise. “He’s the one that kinda made suggestions to all of us,” explained Mantello, “but I think we all came together and thought it would be a good idea on our own. He does what an agent does: He makes you get there and pulls people together and says, ‘You might like each other,’ and, in this case, he was 100% correct.”

Another quiet, critical contribution Lane made occurred in the play’s formative stages when he read an early draft and suggested the complete elimination of a subsidiary character who appeared in both acts of the play—a woman who owned a restaurant near the Manhattan loft where the play is set. Greenberg caved and now confesses, with the advantage of hindsight and nine years of playing, “What she was doing in it, I dunno.”

A Pulitzer Prize contender in 1997, Three Days of Rain occupies two different time zones and adapts two different rhythms—a dirge for Act I (1995) and a fox trot for Act II (1960).

Taken together, the juxtaposition underlines how little we know our parents. In the first act, a brother, sister and best friend reunite for the will-reading of an architectural tycoon who has died a month earlier; the second act flashbacks to three days of rain 35 years earlier when the budding empire of the tycoon and his partner dissolves over the love of the same woman. Act I is second-generation speculation; Act II provides the answers.

The crucial prop of the play is a long-lost diary of the deceased; it has been unearthed and is being interpreted by one of the surviving sons—so it was a matter of some internal angst when Rudd flung it to the floor early in the first act and it inexplicably flew off the lip of the stage into the audience. Two minutes later, a shadowy figure—the only movement in the house—slinked down the side aisle to signal a first-rower to put the book back on the stage, as it would be needed in the rest of the play. The diary, in fact, goes up in flames at the end of the first act, with Rudd cackling in the closing line, “I feel like Hedda Gabler.”

So, the poor actor walked over to the edge of the stage and reached out for the book. When handed it, without breaking character (exactly), he received it with a mute Rudd nod that translated “Much obliged” drawing laughs and applause from the audience.

“It would have been rude just to take it,” Rudd reasoned later at the party. “Sometimes, crazy stuff like that will happen. It never happened before. I imagine—and hope—it will never happen again, but I felt it in a way kinda made me wake up and yell to myself, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m in a play,’ and suddenly I felt rooted in a way I don’t think I was before that.”

The character Rudd plays in the second act has a stammer, and the actor put in the homework to get it right. “I went on line to find documentaries on the subject and found one and then met with the director of that. I also talked to Carol Alexander, who runs a theatre group called Our Time Theatre Company, which is all kids who have speech impediments. I watched people talking on camera with speech impediments. It’s important he have a stutter but not be defined by it. It’s really the relationship of these characters.”  Continued...

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