Who: Patricia Clarkson, John Slattery, Bradley Whitford
What: Reunion reading
Where: Manhattan Theatre Club online
When: March 11-25, free with RSVP
Why: In 1997, Manhattan Theatre Club staged Richard Greenberg’s generational mystery Three Days of Rain, directed by Evan Yionoulis and starring Patricia Clarkson as Nan, John Slattery as her brother, Walker, and Bradley Whitford as their childhood friend Pip. The original cast is reuniting for a virtual reading of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated play, streaming as part of MTC’s “Curtain Call Series,” which kicked off last month with an excellent online version of another taut family drama, Richard Wesley’s The Past Is the Past, featuring Jovan Adepo and Ron Cephas Jones and directed by Oz Scott. The free series continues April 15–25 with Charlayne Woodard’s 1997 one-woman show, Neat.
Bradley Whitford, John Slattery, and Patricia Clarkson reunite for virtual presentation of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain
Update: “Do things really stay secret that long?” Pip asks Nan in MTC’s energetic Zoom reunion presentation of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain. Patricia Clarkson, John Slattery, and Bradley Whitford reprise their roles from the 1997 iteration of Greenberg’s tale of family subterfuge, unrequited love, requited love, mental illness, legacy, and plenty of secrets. The play begins in 1995, as the calm Nan (Clarkson), her brother, the manic-depressive Walker (Slattery), and their childhood friend, soap-opera star Pip (Whitford), prepare for the reading of Nan and Walker’s father’s will. Pip’s father, Theo Wexler, was the longtime business partner of the now-deceased Ned Janeway. They ran what became a successful architectural firm, which allows Greenberg and the characters to use a litany of building metaphors, comparing the construction of houses and office towers to people’s relationships and psyches. (You might also want to keep a running list to look up all of Greenberg’s high-falutin references later, from Heidegger, Hegel, and Handel to Trimalchio’s feast.) After intermission, the action goes back to 1960, with Clarkson as southern belle Lina, Slattery as Ned, and Whitford as Theo, laying the foundation for what would eventually happen to the Janeways and Wexlers.
The three actors are brilliantly engaging, filled with spirit and vitality as each performs from their own home. Director Evan Yionoulis never lets things get too static in those Zoom boxes as the trio share architectural drawings and an old journal. (However, couldn’t they have made sure that Clarkson had the same style blue book as Slattery?) There is an added layer of meta in that Clarkson, Slattery, and Whitford are revisiting their professional past in ways that are similar to how the play goes back in time to the previous set of Janeways and Wexlers; not only are the actors portraying the prior generation, but they’re returning to their own prior generation, nearly a quarter-century earlier, when they were not quite as big stars as they are today. In the brief talkback that accompanies the production, Whitford admits to weeping when he was off camera, overwhelmed by it all. The emotions felt by the actors are palpable; you might not break down in tears, but you will feel their joy and their pain, their confusion and their fears, both theirs and their characters’.
Shot in sharp black-and-white that makes the characters virtually jump off the screen, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck., which opened the 2005 New York Film Festival, is a thrilling behind-the-scenes look at the early days of television journalism at CBS News. David Strathairn is outstanding as Edward R. Murrow, a dedicated reporter who took on Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt in the mid-1950s. As the junior senator continued bringing innocent people down, Murrow challenged him on live TV, walking a fine line between fact and opinion, between staying neutral and injecting personal beliefs into the story. Mixing in plenty of original footage, Clooney captures the mood of the era which was primarily fear while also questioning the importance of television as a form of serious journalism, both things that are extremely relevant in today’s mass-media-driven political culture. Clooney, who cowrote and directed the film, plays legendary CBS producer Fred Friendly in a cast that also features Robert Downey Jr. (Joe Wershba), Patricia Clarkson (Shirley Wershba), Ray Wise (Don Hollenbeck), Frank Langella (William Paley), Jeff Daniels (Sig Mickelson), cowriter Grant Heslov (Don Hewitt), and Dianne Reeves as a jazz singer who often links scenes. Sports fans, take note: Among the executive producers of this low-budget triumph is Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Nominated for six Oscars and winner of none, Good Night, and Good Luck. is screening July 20 at 5:00 as part of the MoMA series “A View from the Vaults: Warner Bros. Today,” consisting of thirty-one films from the last twenty years of movies coming out of the famed studio, including the Harry Potter series as well as such wide-ranging fare as Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, Ted Braun’s Darfur Now, Peter Weir’s Fearless, Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture, and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.