About the Play:

Three Days of Rain has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.

Three Days of Rain is a full-length drama by Richard Greenberg. The three-character play, a mysterious family drama, tells the story of siblings who uncover their architect father's hidden journal, leading them back 30 years to reveal the truth about their parents' lives and loves. The actors play the parents of their first-act characters in this humorous and touching play about family and the enigma of parenthood.

Three Days of Rain explores how the private worlds of one generation are reinterpreted by the next. In the first act, set in 1995, we meet Walker, Nan and Pip. Walker and Nan are siblings, both in their early 30s – he a restless, flaky drifter; she a sensible homemaker. Their famed architect father Ned Janeway died the previous year and Walker is only now back from aimless travel to hear the will, from which he has certain expectations. Also in the mix is a young actor Pip, the son of their father's partner and friend Theo, who died relatively young. The three gather in the Manhattan loft, where thirty-five years earlier, their inscrutable father Ned huddled with Theo to design Janeway House, a landmark structure that would make Ned famous. But there are tensions in the air. Nan is furious at Walker, a fabulously self-obsessed individual. Walker is mad at his father for all manner of things, but chiefly for being his father. They discover his father's journal hidden under a bed that refers, enigmatically, to "three days of rain". When the will delivers a shock, Walker attempts to decipher this reference 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 about what happened during those crucial "three days of rain" and how the legacy may have affected the children. The same three actors play the parents at the same age their children are in Act One: Ned, who seems very different from the cold monster the children conjured; the charismatic and putative genius, Theo; and Lena, Walker and Nan's mother, the delightful, troubled "Southern woman who admits to thirty." Three Days of Rain is an elegant, bittersweet play that offers all the information needed to devise an alternative reading of the sad, unexpectedly romantic family story.

Three Days of Rain premiered in 1997 at the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. The play then received its off-Broadway premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club and was 1998 Drama Critics' Circle Award Runner-Up, Best American Play, and a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2006, the play had its Broadway premiere with a production headlined by Julia Roberts (making her Broadway debut), and Bradley Cooper. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has enjoyed many productions in regional and community theatres across the United States and abroad.

Cast: 1 female, 2 male

What people say:

"...subtle and absorbing generational drama." — New York Times

"…the play unfolds like an archaeological dig, with the past gradually shedding light on the confusion of the present." — Washington Post

"[Greenberg] has mastered the art of telling a simple story with such grace and skill that it becomes startlingly new." — New York Daily News

"This witty and thoughtful play ... deals with middle-class neurosis and family feuds. A tale of the tensions and bonds between two generations of two families.... But it also mulls on the nature of inheritance and the peril of interpreting the past." — Financial Times (UK)

About the Playwright:

Richard Greenberg is an American playwright and television writer, known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. One of the most produced playwrights of his generation, he has had more than 25 plays premiere on and off-Broadway and has won the Oppenheimer Award for a debuting playwright, the first PEN/Laura Pels Award for a mid-career playwright and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.