Scribe paves 'Way' for robust season
Featured Player: Richard Greenberg
If, for some reason, it doesn't click with crix, Greenberg has taken out career insurance this season, with a well-stocked trove of other new works -- "The Well-Appointed Room" (January) at Steppenwolf, "Bal Masque" (April) at D.C.'s Theater J and "The House in Town" (May) at Lincoln Center -- plus one blowout Broadway revival, "Three Days of Rain," a.k.a. the Julia Roberts vehicle.
Although the Tony-winning "Take Me Out" might eventually overtake it, "Rain" remains the scribe's most produced play, a fact that surprises Greenberg. "I wrote the first draft very quickly," he says. "I thought I was only writing for myself. I thought I was indulging myself. I didn't think anyone would want to see it."
Back to back, "Appian Way" and "Rain" make intriguing bookends for the Broadway season. Greenberg's take on family could hardly be more extreme, from the suicidal characters in his 1998 drama to the completely functional family on display in his new one.
In interviews, Greenberg is reserved about his own work, especially when it comes to talking about how one play relates to another: "I don't make intertextual connections. A too-comprehensive self-awareness leads to self-parody."
But he's very good on the weird confluence of events and emotions that, in the end, make a man write a play.
Regarding "Appian Way," he admits, "I was freaking out last August. The Republicans were coming to town. I had just read W.G. Sebald's 'On the Natural History of Destruction' about the bombing of Hamburg, Germany. So I was feeling anxious, and the only way to master anxiety is to write, so I wrote a play, 'The Well-Appointed Room,' which is saturated with anxiety. So I wrote another one, about the most hopeful thing I could think of: the underaddressed topic of a happy family."
Throw in some incest, and you've got "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way."
Greenberg's new play had its debut at South Coast Rep, his eighth play to preem there. Greenberg in the California Southland sounds like an unfruitful mix, but he doesn't see it that way. "It turns out that Orange County is a good background for writing new plays. New plays generate tension, and you don't need all that other tension," says Greenberg, who praises the general "passivity of Orange County," not to mention SCR's aggressive commissioning program.
This summer, all profiles of Greenberg must lead to his new leading lady: Julia Roberts, in "Three Days of Rain." Her involvement was the brainchild of Greenberg's CAA agent, George Lane.
As Greenberg remembers it, "George said to me at one point, 'All right. So Julia's got 'Three Days of Rain.' We'll see.' And I said, 'Julia who?' And George said, 'Roberts.' And I thought, 'That's never going to happen.' "
But happen it did, and Greenberg appears confident.
"Julia Roberts is hugely famous, but someone hugely famous who makes sense in the role," hesays.
