STEVEN DRUKMAN: Contemporary American playwrights usually lay off the Oedipal complex; in fact, Three Days of Rain may be the first wholesale interrogation of the subject since Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Did you set out to do this when you started?
RICHARD GREENBERG: Three Days of Rain has an odd, tortuous history. Back when I was in Yale, a few of us had a naïve idea that there was such a thing as a commercial comedy. We thought, “Let’s write one that will finance the plays we want to write.” So, my strategy was to figure out what “commercial” buttons got pushed in me, so I could reproduce it. This led me on the most complicated, abstruse path to create the most inaccessible play I had ever written! Something entirely opaque—I didn’t even understand it, totally unproducible. But it had something to do with the city, and had a similar device of an actress playing herself as an adult and then at a much earlier age, and characters working out the myths of their parents’ existence. Three Days of Rain is, 12 years later, a much-revised version.
The play’s structure is so taut, I was astonished to learn that there was originally a fourth character. It’s a triangle play!
I know, I know, it utterly is. But there’s always that danger in finding some Ivy League sophistry for keeping something that doesn’t work. I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, “Oh, nobody gets it, that’s all. I’ll write another draft to make her make sense.” It took me a while to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.
Architecture plays an important part in Three Days of Rain, as it does in many of your plays.
Yes, because that’s what I would have wanted to be—if I could do the math. I grew up in Long Island, and I used to browse model homes with my parents for recreation. I was quite taken with the blueprints that would hang in the hallway. I loved the emptiness of the houses and the structural visibility. It was alluring. In the second grade I’d draw what I thought were blueprints, but were just inept sketches with those double lines and rectangles.
In Three Days of Rain, architecture could be taken to mean theatre—where the best-laid plans of blueprints/dramas become something else in buildings/performances.
Yes, and there’s an implicit connection there to marriage, too—the institutions that come out of a moment of inspiration between people, but have to be flexible enough to withstand time and be serviceable. That line about architecture as “frozen music”—something still, but life flows through it.
Attendant to that is the idea of mistrusting any text as the origin of meaning—a post-structuralist concept, which bounces back onto Three Days of Rain. You keep us wondering the whole way through: “Should we trust what this author is divulging here?”
Yes, and what I’m learning is that that naturally happens when you follow the logic of a play. I didn’t set out to do that—it sounds so complicated—but that is a salient feature that was an organic result. Part of it is structural—the isolation of the two acts from one another. If plays, in their explanation, go beyond your intention (and I suppose this is a theme of Three Days of Rain), then it’s successful. Yet I’m not a natural postmodernist.
True, you write structural plays with a definite narrative momentum. And Three Days of Rain has symbols so very freighted with meaning.
(Laughs.) Freighted or laden? This is probably because I had a career before I knew what I was doing, so there was this hysterical freedom from categories like “realism.” I eventually decided I really wanted to learn structure, even if my plays are inflected with heightened symbolic resonance. I fell in love with structure—being in charge of a play. I like it. A lot. Then within that structure, you have a lot of stylistic latitude, to use symbols or absurdist moments, or what have you.
How do you know when to keep a symbol and when to lose it? The name Pip, for example?
Oh, you mean as in Great Expectations? I kept it for fun—yes, the play deals with inheritance and there’s a Pip, but there’s no connection. It’s a blind alley. I think the character is a pip, that’s all—Dickens be damned.
But the character Walker—
OK, yes, there the name means something, as in the second act when his father says he would like to have been a flaneur—a walker. I found it moving that the father would name him after what he loved.
Like many of your plays, Three Days of Rain is populated with accomplished, articulate people—maybe too bright for their own good. Sometimes they undermine their own happiness.
Sometimes? You should probably say, “almost exclusively.” (Laughs.) All my characters do that, but that’s what so-called bright people do, I think. I’d like to write a dumb character, I really would. I think it’s a challenge.
Save it for film or TV, perhaps?
Oh yes, that “spec script” that I’m someday going to write. You know, that “spec script” is my Moscow. Strangely enough, Three Days of Rain was finished in a burst of playwriting after I decided to try writing for film. I met Peter Hedges (to whom this play is dedicated) walking home in the rain, and we started talking, and we got excited about writing plays again—which neither one of us had been doing at that moment. It started this flurry of activity that has made me write like crazy, which is why I don’t even have time for this interview.
