Theatrical Craftsmanship in "Three Days of Rain"

Silas Weir Mitchell brings his technically fantastic acting chops to the technically fantastic script of Three Days of Rain at Portland Center Stage.

Three Days of Rain is fairly standard kitchen-sink realism (the water in the sink even runs), to which Silas Weir Mitchell brings fairly standard acting techniques as Walker and Ned Janeway. So far so bland, but it's the proficiency of Richard Greenberg's script and Mitchell's acting that elevate PCS' production above what could have been prosaic stage-filler to something really exciting.

Three Days of Rain is written anti-chronologically: the first act is set in 1995, and the second act in 1965. Act One deals with Walker Janeway, his sister Nan (Lisa Datz) and childhood friend Pip Wexler (Sasha Roiz) just prior to and just after the reading of Ned's will. Pip's father Theo (also played by Sasha Roiz) and Ned were architectural business partners. Theo died first, and much later Ned. Neither Nan nor Walker were particularly close to Ned: he was a silent man and a distant father. Hence Walker's excitement at finding his father's journal in the apartment where Ned and Theo lived when they began their practice, which also serves as the venue for the entire play. The journal poses more questions than it answers: the evening on which their mentally unstable mother heard Walker laughing and bolted through a glass window, emerging "like a crystal being, then colorized," is entered into the journal simply as "a terrible night." The journal even begins prosaically: "three days of rain." The first act poses these questions and others, and the second act sets out to answer them by allowing us into a critical moment in the relationship between Ned and Theo and the mother Lina (also played by Datz).

Three Days of Rain's protagonists are Walker and Ned Janeway: Silas Weir Mitchell's characters. That means, taken as a whole, the play is the story of the relationship between son and father, and that it falls primarily on Mitchell's shoulders to tell that story. His acting, therefore, is the focal point of PCS's Three Days of Rain, and his presence on stage is a credit to Roiz and director Chris Coleman's bringing him into their prospective collaboration, from whence this project springs. Mitchell's technique as an actor is phenomenal. Currently, audiences have their primary exposure to him in his work as a series regular on Grimm (also co-starring Roiz), but his resume goes back years to his undergraduate and graduate work at Brown and UC San Diego, respectively. Even in minor roles, written as jokes, such as Donny Jones on My Name Is Earl, his technique steals his scenes. The only problem with Mitchell on TV is that we don't get to see enough of him. Three Days of Rain is a fantastic showcase for Mitchell's craft in that it allows us to see him use physicality, voice and methods of receiving information over the course of more than two hours to define two very different characters. Besides just showing us what a great actor Mitchell is, PCS' Three Days of Rain is a testament to the importance of craftsmanship in theater.

Greenberg's script has been performed in LORT theaters since the 90s, and with good reason: it's a technical masterpiece that plays well to Boomer subscribers comfortable with kitchen-sink realism. As such, it's a perfect vehicle for a technically brilliant actor like Silas Weir Mitchell. It's a reminder that if you're doing something well, even if you're doing something as notoriously familiar as kitchen-sink realism, you'll be doing something exciting and special.

Affirming Life in the Face of Certain Death

Adam Bock's A Small Fire sets out to explore what remains of a person's Self when their physical connection to the world is stripped away. But the question the audience is left with is, why does he back off before completing his project?

In A Small Fire, currently playing at Portland Center Stage through March 23rd, Bock clinically removes the senses of the protagonist Jenny Bridges (played by Hollye Gilbert) in an almost Beckettian fashion. Artistic Director Chris Coleman contextualizes this project by quoting Joseph Campbell:  

"...you can't identify with the body, as the body is going to fade: it's temporary, it is designed to fail. But there is another part of you that goes on, that is not attached to the body, that can see the whole story from a distance. And if you are identifying with that part of yourself, with your soul, then the falling away of the body is just another chapter in your story."

Jenny is a forewoman on a construction crew. She's foul-mouthed, in charge, and very much alive. At least until she temporarily goes deaf, signified by a loud tone blasted from the speaker system. Her next physical failure isn't temporary. Her sense of smell and incumbent sense of taste disappear. Then the lights, rapidly gaining in intensity and brightness, indicate that now her vision is gone. Her blindness brings with it decreased individual agency. She snaps at her daughter, Emily (Peggy J. Scott), while being dressed that she is "not a sack of potatoes." The loud tone comes back, permanently deafening her and cutting further into her independence. Up to this point, director Rose Riordan has told the story using a mostly Chekhovian realism. But, subsequent to the failure of Jenny's fourth sense, she and her lighting and sound designers (Diane Ferry Williams and Casi Pacilio respectively) blank out the space with darkness. Jenny stands alone in a tight spotlight and her disembodied voice delivers her despair. But then the lights come on, and she and her husband (played by Tom Bloom) make love. She ends the play affirming that "I'm still in here."

The conceit of the play is to strip away the protagonists' senses one by one. The goal, as stated by Coleman in his program note, is to find the part of the Self that exists beyond the five senses. But we never get there. Instead of exploring death and how the cessation of bodily functions affects a person's identity, Bock ends with a false affirmation of life. It's an affirmation reminiscent of the Restoration script doctors who gave King Lear a happy ending, and equally unsatisfying. In plays about death, pre-mortem denouements do the audience a disservice. Theater ought to be a place where the community can explore issues that effect them together, and what do we have in common more than our mortality?

Instead of allowing us to ask a question about ourselves, Bock calls into question his own artistic decision making. Why does he end the play before it's over? Why does he honey us with a pleasant falsehood? One of the benefits of American theater's obsession with Shakespeare is that it gives American audiences a high standard to hold our playwrights to. And modern playwrights ought to know this, and wrestle as aggressively with difficult human questions as their primary competitor for the American stage. 

People's Republic of Portland

Last night I watched a comedian from a major American metropolis tell amusing anecdotes about our Cascadian paradise. Was I sucking back PBR with my Umpqua ice-cream in a dimly-lit room going on a Portlandia marathon? Of course not! Everyone who’s anyone knows to pair an Old Rasputin with dairy desserts. And I wasn’t watching Portlandia anyways. I put on my second favorite black tie and headed downtown to Lauren Weedman’s People’s Republic of Portland at Portland Center Stage. And no, it wasn’t just a theatrical staging of Fred and Carrie’s TV hit. Those New Yorkers go for sketch comedy, but L.A. Lauren’s show is stand-up/storytelling. And that gal can spin a yarn! She regaled us with her misadventures visiting Portland for the first time. A seasoned solo performer, she kept the audience entranced with her vivid depictions Portland types that we all know and love, or at least know and tolerate. Whereas Fred and Carrie have the luxury of costumes and actual locations, Lauren didn’t need any of those. For the most part, in fact, whenever she tried to stray away from telling the story with just her voice and body and tried to bring in lights and music, the choice felt forced. It disrupted the flow of her narrative and didn’t contribute anything. But the standing ovation she got at the end excuses any misguided theatricality. All told, People’s Republic panders to Portandian egos in the same way as the TV show: we love it when representatives from our big city sisters New York and L.A. come here and tell us how quirky and awesome we are.

Beer McMennamin’s Ruby Ale. It’s a fun Portland beer, and People’s Republic is a fun Portland play.