Playwright: Richard Greenberg
At: Actors Revolution Theatre at Steep Theater, 3902 N. Sheridan Rd.
Phone: ( 773 ) 531-9079; $20
Runs through: Sept 18
In Act One, playwright Richard Greenberg introduces us to Walker Janeway, the kind of intensely neurotic young man indigenous ( in literature, anyway ) to lower Manhattan, and to his preternaturally well-adjusted comrades—Nan, his proper-Boston-matron sister, and Pip Wexler, a peripatetic television actor whose lineage, as the offspring of the co-founder that made the architectural firm of Wexler Janeway famous, has inextricably linked him to the Janeway siblings. They are reunited for the reading of the late Edmund Janeway's will, after a year-long search for the deceased's globe-trotting son. But what commands their attention is the journal discovered in the squalid apartment occupied 35 years earlier by their respective sires—a laconic document they are certain holds the key to the dynamic binding them to one another in eternal discontent.
Their obsessive search for ancestral prophesies would make for drama in itself, but Greenberg lets us in on the secret by transporting us backwards in Act Two, where we become privy to the events so earnestly puzzled over a generation later. As expected, the truth turns out to be vastly different than the scenario projected in 1995—even to how Walker got his name—but the relationships are sadly similar, with only the role-functions changed.
If The Cryptogram is David Mamet mimicking Harold Pinter, Three Days Of Rain is Greenberg channeling J.D. Salinger. Its hypersensitive waifs vent their anguish in eloquent laments of frustrated ambivalence, our acknowledgment of their pain exacerbated by our insight into the circumstances mandating their ignorance. If this story has a moral, it's an exhortation for would-be chroniclers to avoid the oracular and embrace the intelligible.
The Actors Revolution Theatre, for its debut, has chosen an ambitious play, its mannerist structure compounded by the obstacles associated with the Steep Theater's alley-shaped stage, and by director Karen Yates' propensity for positioning characters to face walls or even corners, thus forcing her performers to play at one another, to the exclusion of the audience. Such concerns prove minor, however, given Greenberg's compassion for privileged waifs cast spiritually adrift and the undeniable talent exhibited by this newest addition to Chicago's burgeoning storefront circuit.