Playwright Richard Greenberg was the maestro of shimmering verbal arias. His well-born characters spoke as if that they had been transplanted in opposition to their will from a Henry James novel to the later twentieth century. Their circumlocutions had been as entrancing as their capacity to search out essentially the most exactly ironic phrases for difficult-to-name realities.
Greenberg, who died on July 4 at 67 from most cancers, shot to the theater world’s consideration with a rave New York Occasions assessment of “Eastern Standard.” Of the play’s 1988 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Membership, Frank Wealthy wrote, “If Mr. Greenberg’s only achievement were to re-create the joy of screwball comedies, from their elegant structure to their endlessly quotable dialogue, ‘Eastern Standard’ would be merely dazzling good fun. But what gives this play its unexpected weight and subversive punch is its author’s ability to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of either his troubling content or his effervescent theatrical form.”
There was large pleasure when “Eastern Standard” moved to Broadway, the place I noticed the play as a pupil the next 12 months. My expertise didn’t fairly reside as much as Wealthy’s lavish reward, however I used to be certainly dazzled by Greenberg’s New York wit, which struck me as an acutely delicate, off-angle model of George S. Kaufman’s Broadway brio.
Anne Meara was the discuss of the city within the position of a bag woman who spurned the self-congratulatory charity of responsible swells. However the play additionally showcased a brand new technology of performing expertise, together with Patricia Clarkson and Dylan Baker, two classmates of Greenberg’s from the Yale Faculty of Drama who, having been steeped in Shakespeare and Shaw, had no drawback delivering the rapid-fire repartee of the play’s fastidiously sculpted dialogue.
However it was years later, in “Three Days of Rain,” that Greenberg extra totally realized his presents. I’m referring, in fact, to not the 2006 Broadway premiere that occasioned the publicity earthquake of Julia Roberts’ Broadway debut, however the 1997 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Membership, the place I noticed its unparalleled forged, Clarkson (in much more mesmerizing kind), John Slattery and Bradley Whitford.
“Three Days of Rain” was commissioned and first produced by South Coast Repertory. Greenberg, in truth, acquired extra commissions than another playwright in SCR’s historical past, 10 of which had been produced by the theater, together with different of his performs.
Patricia Clarkson and John Slattery within the 1997 South Coast Repertory world premiere manufacturing of Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain.”
( South Coast Repertory)
The characters in “Three Days of Rain” discuss their approach into theatrical existence — as a lot for the viewers’s profit as for their very own. The grownup youngsters of famend architects who had tragic lives, they’re struggling to discover a path ahead from the wreckage of the previous. Slattery’s Walker, sensible and unbalanced, with shades of his mentally in poor health mom, is essentially the most troubled. He’s a relentless supply of fear for his sister, Nan (Clarkson), who hasn’t time to dwell on her personal fragility along with her brother hyper-articulating his nervous breakdowns.
Pip (Whitford), the son of the architectural accomplice of Walker and Nan’s father, is a daytime tv actor who has made peace with being extremely profitable somewhat than a genius. His ostentatious well-being is scorned by Walker, who equates equilibrium with compromise. However Pip rebukes Walker for “changing the temperature” of each room by “tyrannical, psychosocial … fiat.”
The play, a diptych, has a second act wherein the identical actors play the roles of the mother and father of their first-act characters. Greenberg mockingly examines the inscrutability of the previous, whose most important connection to the current might reside within the shared vulnerability to “error” — the ultimate phrase on this gorgeously written play.
The Broadway revival of “Three Days of Rain,” not being as confidently carried out, revealed a standard frailty in Greenberg’s dramaturgy — the tendency towards structural abstraction. His performs are held collectively by thematic concepts James would have put to good use in his novels however are more durable to construct a dramatic world upon. (Greenberg informed me that he dropped out of Harvard’s grad program in English and American literature after not ending James’ “The Princess Casamassima” for a seminar, however his sensibility was essentially the most Jamesian of all modern American playwrights.)
There are two moments in “Three Days of Rain” the place dialog on creative issues reveals fairly a bit about Greenberg’s personal relationship to his chosen artwork kind. Nan, invoking Goethe (one thing not anomalous in a Greenberg play), refers to structure as “frozen music” (a beautiful description of the play’s dialogue) and talks about the best way an incredible constructing comprises one thing that may’t be anticipated by the plan, irrespective of how scrupulously designed.
Walker, ending his sister’s level, explains, “There’s an intuition held in reserve, a secret the architect keeps until the building is built.” One thing equally latent inheres in Greenberg’s dramaturgy.
Later, Nan, describing the kind of play her mom favored when she first got here to New York, permits Greenberg to take pleasure in some delectable self-irony. She tells Pip that her mom would attend a type of matinees “you could never remember the plot of, where the girl got caught in the rain and had to put on the man’s bathrobe and they sort of did a little dance around each other and fell in love. And there wasn’t even a single good joke, but my mother would walk out after and the city seemed dizzy with this absolutely random happiness.”
That’s exactly how I exited Manhattan Theatre Membership after I first noticed “Three Days of Rain.” My euphoria stemmed as a lot from the mandarin eloquence of the characters as from the unanticipated magic that may occur when a playwright finds his group of actors.
Greenberg was a prolific author, which can have been unfairly held in opposition to him. I feel the larger problem was that his huge presents left many admirers ready impatiently for his American stage masterpiece, which by no means fairly got here collectively.
“Take Me Out,” a few star baseball participant who breaks a cultural taboo by popping out as homosexual, is essentially the most celebrated of Greenberg’s works. Winner of the Tony for greatest play in 2003, it additionally received awards for Joe Mantello’s route and Denis O’Hare’s efficiency as homosexual monetary advisor Mason Marzac, who turns into an unlikely rabid baseball fan.
There’s a breathless monologue wherein Mason deconstructs the artwork of baseball as “the perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society.” One of many nice theatrical speeches written within the final 25 years, this vertiginous paean to America’s pastime was little question a consider O’Hare’s win. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who was within the Tony-winning 2022 Broadway revival, received a Tony for a similar position, a testomony to a supple comedian performer and an evergreen half.
I like what Greenberg makes an attempt in “Take Me Out,” although I don’t assume he solely succeeds. It’s not simply that the locker-room banter generally seems like a college lounge at some aggressive liberal arts faculty. It’s that the swirling concepts of the play and the dramatic building aren’t a seamless match.
“The Assembled Parties,” the title of Greenberg’s 2013 Broadway play, is an apt metaphor for the problem that playwright had in coalescing his glowing chat-fests into satisfying dramas. So typically the entire appeared barely lower than the sum of its scintillating elements.
The smaller canvas of the one-act kind allowed Greenberg to hone in his theatrical imaginative and prescient. Maybe this accounts for the enduring success of “The Author’s Voice,” an early Kafkaesque work that literalizes the divide between an artist’s primitive facet that does the grunt inventive work and the camera-ready facet that basks within the empty glory.
However Greenberg’s disappointments could possibly be value greater than different writers’ triumphs. He wrote magnificently for actors, endowing them with powers of speech that surpass the capacities of most mere mortals. To listen to Judith Mild, Jessica Hecht, Linda Lavin, Peter Frechette, Slattery or Whitford converse on this heightened theatrical patois was to change into immediately spellbound.
Clarkson, in a league of her personal, turned the gold of Greenberg’s prose into embodied thought and feeling. However magniloquence was hardly the entire story. The weak sound of Slattery’s delicate stammer within the second half of “Three Days of Rain” and the opinionated maternal astringency of Jenny O’Hara in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” at South Coast Repertory level to the varied registers of the playwright’s wide-ranging vocabulary.
Greenberg, a considerably reclusive character, stayed away from the highlight, however was deeply linked to the group of artists who helped him discover his voice. Amongst them, director Evan Yionoulis, one other Yale Faculty of Drama classmate, who directed “Three Days of Rain” at Manhattan Theatre Membership and shepherded many different of his performs from growth to the stage.
The laughter echoes down a long time. I can nonetheless hear the sisters in “Everett Beekin,” a type of Greenberg’s works I needed so badly to love greater than I did, speaking competitively about their upwardly cell desires of their mom’s Decrease East Facet tenement. Greenberg captures the postwar ethos in a single line when one of many sister’s explains to a customer that her household lives “in Levittown for the time being, but later on, you never know.” Greenberg, a local son of Lengthy Island, encoded his social observations concerning the frenzied actual property hierarchy in comedian language that not often if ever missed its mark.
