Michael Laurence as Ned and Eric Martin Brown as Theo in Studio Arena's "Three Days of Rain"

THREE DAYS OF RAIN

The Beginning of Gaffney

The current production of Richard Greenberg’s play, Three Days of Rain, at Studio Arena Theatre, is historic. This marks the beginning of Kathleen Gaffney’s reign at the artistic helm of Buffalo’s most prominent theater.

One might have expected Gaffney’s first choice to be more of a blockbuster or attention-grabber. I recall the season when Mark Lamos took over leadership at the Hartford Stage Company with a lavishly produced production of Shakespeare’s rarely seen Cymbeline. Josephine Abady launched her years at the Cleveland Play House with a production of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday starring Madeline Kahn and Edward Asner that transferred to Broadway.

Studio Arena has heralded the arrival of Kathleen Gaffney. Her larger-than-life photograph embraces the audience with welcoming arms outstretched as they enter the theater. Her face is on every brochure for the new season. But there is a blurring of the artistic line before and after Gaffney.

There was not a distinct transition between the previous artistic director and now. There was a hybrid season of limbo in between. I imagine that most members of the Studio Arena audience have no idea that neither Gaffney nor her predecessor chose her season opener, Three Mo’ Divas, or that Three Days of Rain is the first play she has selected personally, or that her direction of this play is her first hands-on contribution to Studio Arena Theatre as an artist.

This low-key approach is, perhaps, wise. For Studio Arena faces a challenge in the area of audience development.

Earlier this week as I sat in the audience of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre in New York City waiting to see the first part of Tom Stoppard’s new trilogy, I overheard three elderly matinee ladies behind me in a heated discussion of the play we were about to see, the career of Tom Stoppard, Russian history and literature, and of the various artists associated with the project. Looking over the names of the actors one woman noted that Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke was in the cast. “Well, Ethan Hawke is well known,” she offered, adding, “I don’t know for what, but he’s well known!” The three ladies, theater mavens all, laughed in knowing delight.

Such conversations are not the norm at Studio Arena Theatre. Whereas the audience here once delighted in seeing great productions of the classics, new plays and productions of New York’s most recent and most important hits, today’s audience is more accustomed to disposable entertainments concocted with innocuous diversion in mind. Few would have predicted that a theater that opened in 1965 with founding artistic director Neal Du Brock’s debut choice, a landmark production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten starring the great Colleen Dewhurst and James Daly, directed by the world’s most celebrated interpreter of O’Neill, Jose Quintero, would live to become best known for beautiful stagecraft in forgettable and unimportant plays. Studio Arena must now contend with the challenge of reasserting itself as an artistically vital theater with an audience weaned on productions of third-rate shows like Shear Madness.

Three Days of Rain arrives like a test balloon. A serious yet accessible drama, and a recent Broadway success, this show is being floated past the Studio Arena audience almost inconspicuously. Gaffney is justifiably proud that her production is the first of a script by Richard Greenberg to be done in Buffalo—remarkable, given Greenberg’s prolific output and great popularity elsewhere. But Gaffney has not staked her reputation on this show. She has cast her aspirations rather higher. Even as she professes her admiration and her fondness of Three Days of Rain, she indicates that her real interest is not so much in this specific play, and not so much in Greenberg’s other celebrated plays, but in Greenberg himself and the plays he has not yet written.

Her eye is on the future. Gaffney’s strategy is a slow and deliberate build.

Her next project at Studio Arena is an attention-grabber and a potential blockbuster. A collaboration with television producer Tom Fontana, the college chum who first recommended Gaffney for the Studio Arena job, The Fourth Wiseman is a stage adaptation of Fontana’s television movie of the same title. In rehearsal now, it will arrive in time for Christmas with lavish production elements, including oversized puppets and a story certain to appeal to Buffalo’s heavily Catholic audience base.

Sara Surrey as Lina and Michael Laurence as Ned in "Three Days of Rain"

For now, however, we have the puzzle of this enigmatic little play with its eye on the slippery past called Three Days of Rain.

In Three Days of Rain, we meet Walker and Nan Janeway, brother and sister who are the grown children of an internationally famous architect. The two are meeting in the apartment/studio where their parents first met and where their father and his architectural partner began their fabled collaboration. Here, we learn two important pieces of information: Walker has stumbled upon his father’s journal, which begins with the phrase, “Three Days of Rain,” and brother and sister have reunited because of the man’s recent death. In fact, they are preparing to visit the lawyer who will tell them the details of his will. Walker and Nan are joined by Pip, the beefcake star of a grade B television show, who is the son of the old man’s collaborator, and a childhood friend of both of them. Relations between the three are complicated and strained, and become more strained still when the details of the will are revealed.

Act Two. The action moves backward in time as the same actors now play their own parents. We learn that the conclusions the younger generation has drawn about their parents, while rooted in fact, are substantially and unequivocally false in fundamental and important ways.

That’s the play.

It is a beautiful and eloquent piece with plenty of opportunities for delicious acting. Gaffney has delivered a smart production, handsomely designed by Wilson Chin with the obligatory high level of stagecraft expected by Studio Arena audiences. Chin’s lower Manhattan loft apartment, which undergoes a total transformation as the clock turns back a generation, is effectively illuminated and given marvelously expressive mood and contour by lighting designer Lynne M. Koscielniak. As the title promises, it even rains.

Gaffney has directed her able cast with a sure hand and we get a very clear sense of the six distinct characters played by the three strong actors. Michael Laurence, who plays Walker in Act One and his father Ned in Act Two, creates two wonderfully contrasting people. So, too, does Sara Surrey, who plays Walker’s sister Nan in Act One, and their mother Lina in Act Two.

In its two New York City outings, the relationship between brother and sister was undeniably the central thread in the tale of Three Days of Rain. In this production, Eric Martin Brown, the actor who plays Pip in Act One and Theo in Act Two, dominates. This is an intriguing interpretation, for in terms of the play’s structure, Pip and Theo are undeniably complications and obstacles, not the impetuses to the through-lines of the double drama. Here, however, Brown lands the most solidly lucid characterizations, capturing our attention and at times even our sympathy. His performance stands apart for being entirely graceful and without any suggestion of actorly presentation.

In Act One, Brown’s character serves to accentuate the divide between the deceased father and his children, and also between the siblings themselves. In Act Two, his character is the obstacle between Ned and his career success, and also the obstacle between Ned and Lina’s attraction to each other. The resolution of the play comes when all of these obstacles are, in a single instant, overcome; Lina asserts herself as the influence that inspires Ned to realize his genius, simultaneously signaling her love for him and contradicting future indictments by their children of their relationship, of Ned’s talent, and of both their motivations. We know that all will come to ruin in the fullness of time, but in this magical moment, all the hurts of the past and false conclusions of the future melt away. During one lost instant, their lives made sense. Ned punctuates the moment with the prophetic line, “The beginning of error!” It is a moment that actors Laurence and Surrey play very beautifully, and which signals the end of the play.

There are times when the action does meander and lag, as actors indulge in the idiosyncrasies of the characters and wander, emotionally, away from the central action of the play. This is especially true in Act One, in which the idiosyncrasies are more cerebral—Surrey’s character is perturbed and remote; Laurence’s is seemingly manic-depressive and oh, so easily distracted. Act Two, in which Mr. Laurence must affect a stutter and Miss Surrey takes on a southern accent, plays more briskly and directly. The issue, however, is ultimately very minor. Gaffney has delivered a solid production, which played with confidence and power on the opening night. Furthermore, she has set a tone for serious drama which begs to be reflected upon and discussed, and she has introduced the Studio Arena audience to one of the most important American playwrights working today.

The beginning of triumph!

REEFER MADNESS

The Alleyway Theatre production of Reefer Madness, the musicalization of the 1937 exploitation film that professed to warn young people about the evils of marijuana, is a total delight. With direction and costumes by Todd Warfield and a cast of musical theater zanies, we are treated to a textbook example of rhetorical overstatement as we take a ride down the slippery slope from a single toke to a life of murder, debauchery and foul language. And we love every minute!

The original film was always self-parody, so Warfield has a lot to work with in this outrageous musical reworking by Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy. Warfield keeps the proceedings moving at a lightning pace as the cast of this handmade production maneuver its scenic elements and play its over-the-top moments with an air of spontaneity and joy.

Chris J. Handley and Jennifer Caruana are particularly strong in the central roles of Jimmy and Mary, the innocent juvenile and ingénue whose lives are destroyed by the evil weed. Handley has perfected the angel-faced crazy shtick and employs it to full effect as his character’s life on dope careens out of control.

Miss Caruana has played an ingénue or two in her time—Maria in West Side Story; Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz; Fiona in Brigadoon; Grace in Annie; Laurey in Oklahoma. She knows the territory, which proves to be an asset in a spoof that takes the pure-hearted yet air-headed ingénue and sets her staggering out of control on a drug-induced collision course with the nymphomaniacal dominatrix within.

Alleyway has packed a lot of musical and comedic experience into the delightfully deranged population of the play: Guy Tomassi as the lecturer who presides over this cautionary tale; Jeffrey Coyle as a demented and murderous dope fiend; Kim Piazza as Mae, the drug-addicted gangster’s moll with a heart of gold; Stephanie Bax as the cheerful but morally bankrupt druggie who sells her baby for a fix; Casey Denton as the charmless drug pusher who was born to dance. Each commits to the role with total conviction and abandon.

Choreography by Carlos Jones is excellent—witty, clever and lively—and is executed by a capable crew of dancers, including Anna Shoemaker, Andrea Dudziak, Christopher S. Parada and Micah A. Stanton, who double in numerous roles.

Warfield has a delightfully camp aesic which reigns supreme through every element of this outlandish production. His costumes are especially entertaining and range from 1937 period clothes to a Las Vegas Heaven fantasy sequence. As wildly fun as an arcade game, this show blinks, it tilts, and it blows intoxicatingly funny smoke rings.