You learn a lot about top-tier performers by the projects they pick. If it's all about ego and self-glorification, it's star vehicles all the way. But not so for the biggest star of them all, Julia Roberts, who pulls a fast one by choosing Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain for her Broadway debut. Nan is a modest role; it's the play's plethora of ideas and expansive language that are — or should be — the main attraction. It isn't at all Nan's play.
Act I, set in a downtown Manhattan loft, finds Nan's brother, the peripatetic Walker (Paul Rudd), crashing in the same loft where 35 years earlier their now-famous architect father, Ned, huddled with his business partner, Theo, to design a landmark structure, Janeway House. Theo is long dead and now Ned is, too, and here comes Nan — fresh from Boston, marriage, family life — ready to hear the lawyer read their father's will.
Compared to Nan, whose lines tend toward the staccato, Walker is a classic Greenberg character: too bright, too much a conveyor belt for verbal exhibitionism. Words like "端berkind" and "torpid" tumble forth in waves from this troubled, tousle-haired lost boy. He is an itchy brew of neuroses, homosexuality, and elliptical anguish.
During this first act, Roberts seems stiff beside Rudd, clutching her bag and keeping her raincoat on for an interminable stretch. But her choice is right: Nan is a well-combed lost girl, now a tightly wound woman.
Walker expects to inherit Janeway House, but Ned has left it to Theo's son Pip (Bradley Cooper), who stars on a soap opera as "someone named Butte who never wears a shirt and is carnally entangled with someone named Savannah." To explain this, Greenberg shifts in Act II to 1960 — with the actors playing the parents of the characters from Act I — when Ned (Rudd) and Theo (Cooper) were deep in their artisanship and when Lina's (Roberts) romance with Theo yielded to something deeper with Ned. (Rudd's technical mastery of Ned's pronounced stutter is extraordinary.) Occurring over three rainy days, Act II allows Roberts to play the character with traces of her own native Southern accent, which comes and goes.
A story of personal challenges — of intimacy, creativity, searching, and meaning — requires actors to work small, not to drop loads of bombast. And small is how Roberts works. Watch how she moves her hands, darts her eyes, furrows her brow, softens her voice; watch how she gravitates physically toward her fellow actors. It's stage acting more suitable for Off-Off-Broadway, perhaps. Given time, she'll be very good, for her instincts are there, even if there is a certain incompletion to her technique.
If anything, it is Rudd and Cooper who are forced to tiptoe up to the ledge of overacting, and that's only because they're taking their cue from Greenberg's literary curlicues and Joe Mantello's souped-up direction, including lots of onstage rain. Broadway is a cruel place to develop your craft, and Roberts must assuredly feel that cruelty. But people who don't understand what she's doing — and who expect a star performance — are all wet.
Presented by Marc Platt, David Stone, and the Shubert Organization at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., NYC. April 19-June 18. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 239-6200 or www.telecharge.com. Casting by Bernard Telsey Casting.