Three Days of Rain and Other Plays: Three Days of Rain; The American Plan; The Author's Voice; Hurrah at Last

By Richard Greenberg

Book Overview

Richard Greenberg is the winner of the Newsday's George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright, the Molly Kazan Playwriting Award, the Pen/Laura Pels Award, and his play Three Days of Rain was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. He has been called "a major new playwright" who has "mastered the art of telling a simple story with such grace and skill that it becomes startlingly new" (Fintan O'Toole, New York Daily News). Greenberg's plays have developed a reputation for being "intelligent, whimsical, always powerful pieces of theatre that are profound without being pretentious and that speak about the very basic longing of human beings" (Amy Schaumberg, Drama-Logue). Collected in this volume are Greenberg's most important plays, including his latest, Hurrah at Last, which Laurie Winer in the Los Angeles Times called "funny, acerbic and delightfully straightforward about falsehoods and bargains of intimacy."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802136362
• ISBN13: 9780802136367
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Greenburg Collection

Richard Greenburg transports you in the middle of interesting and complicated adventures with his casts. I love reading his plays because his characters have fascinating relationships with each other. The author's voice is very funny! I highly recommend reading his works.

A great new writer

Wouldn't you have liked to go to the theatre to see the crucible without knowing that it was a classic. Watching three days of rain was the first time I went to the theatre unaware of anything about the play and then realising that I was watching one of the greatest plays ever written unfurl around me. The play is at times witty or sad or profound, but it is always real and Greenberg shows the links between the past and the future and the impossibility of knowing or understanding the forces that drove your parents. We get a picture of the parents and it is shaken apart in the second half. Three days of rain is a truely great piece of theatre.

Wonderful, Stunning, Beautiful

Greenberg's characters are as honest as a writer can possibly make them. You always know what they mean to say when they get cut off or change their minds, what they have left unsaid, where exactly their thoughts are coming from. He does a masterful job as a playwright and gives honor to the genre, not to mention that he makes the actor's job unbearably easy. Three Days Of Rain is a profoundly touching play that makes you reexamine any assumptions, and recognize the immense power of any single moment.

Saw the Steppenwolf Production

I saw the same production at Steppenwolf- what great writing. These characters are smart! Its a tight little peice, about our pasts, and what we know about our parents, being an artists. All of those big themes- you'd think it would be cumbersome. But this is a great play- can't wait to see what the regional theatres do with it, and can't wait to read more by Greenburg.

Not quite a review . . .

We saw the production of the play "Three Days of Rain" at the Steppenwolf theater in Chicago, IL. It was a tour de force of the American spirit, focusing on the cross-generational relationships between three characters as represented by first a brother, sister, and friend, and then their parents. If any of Greenberg's other plays even approach "Three Days of Rain," this book will be a must-read.