A Study Guide for Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain"

Three Days of Rain

Richard Greenberg

1997

Introduction

Richard Greenberg's play Three Days of Rain is a revealing family drama that focuses on adult children and their often limited understanding of their parents. The drama concerns Nan and Walker, children of a famous architect, Ned Janeway, and his wife, Lina. Closely intertwined in their lives is Pip, who is the son of Ned's partner, Theo Wexler, and Theo's wife, Maureen. Greenberg's script is written for only three actors. The actors who play Nan, Walker, and Pip also play Lina, Ned, and Theo, respectively.

The play is broken into two acts. The first is set in Manhattan in 1995 and takes place after the recent death of Ned. The second act is set in 1960, also in Manhattan, and concerns the ending of Lina's romance with Theo and the beginning of her relationship with Ned. In the aftermath of Ned's death, Nan, Walker and Pip are forced to reexamine their shared past. They make assumptions about their parents, their parents' relationships with them as children, and their parents' relationships with one another. The second act reveals some of the truth about the parents' relationships and underscores the misinterpretation of the past that the adult children make. In addition to contrasting the present and past, the children and their parents, Greenberg examines such themes as love and betrayal. Three Days of Rain was originally published in 1997 and staged on October 21, 1997, in New York City. The play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year.

Author Biography

Greenberg was born on February 22, 1958, in East Meadow, New Jersey, to Leon and Shirley Greenberg. Greenberg earned a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University in 1980 and a master of fine arts (MFA) degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1985. In 1984, before he had completed his MFA, a play of Greenberg's won the George Oppenheimer Award, which is bestowed upon the best New York debut by an American dramatist. That play was The Bloodletters. Greenberg followed this with a series of one-act plays. His early full-length plays include Eastern Standard, which was published and staged in 1988, and The American Plan (1990). Greenberg experimented with form in plays such as Jenny Keeps Talking (1992), which is composed of three monologues. He published and staged Three Days of Rain in 1997. Recent work has included Our Mother's Brief Affair (2009), the story for a