Playwright Richard Greenberg brought an exquisite fluency to the American stage

Playwright Richard Greenberg was the maestro of shimmering verbal arias. His well-born characters spoke as if they had been transplanted against their will from a Henry James novel to the later 20th century. Their circumlocutions were as entrancing as their ability to find the most precisely ironic words for difficult-to-name realities.

Greenberg, who died on July 4 at 67 from cancer, shot to the theater world’s attention with a rave New York Times review of “Eastern Standard.” Of the play’s 1988 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, Frank Rich wrote, “If Mr. Greenberg’s only achievement were to re-create the joy of screwball comedies, from their elegant structure to their endlessly quotable dialogue, ‘Eastern Standard’ would be merely dazzling good fun. But what gives this play its unexpected weight and subversive punch is its author’s ability to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of either his troubling content or his effervescent theatrical form.”

There was tremendous excitement when “Eastern Standard” moved to Broadway, where I saw the play as a student the following year. My experience didn’t quite live up to Rich’s lavish praise, but I was indeed dazzled by Greenberg’s New York wit, which struck me as an acutely sensitive, off-angle version of George S. Kaufman’s Broadway brio.

Anne Meara was the talk of the town in the role of a bag lady who spurned the self-congratulatory charity of guilty swells. But the play also showcased a new generation of acting talent, including Patricia Clarkson and Dylan Baker, two classmates of Greenberg’s from the Yale School of Drama who, having been steeped in Shakespeare and Shaw, had no problem delivering the rapid-fire repartee of the play’s carefully sculpted dialogue.

But it was years later, in “Three Days of Rain,” that Greenberg more fully realized his gifts. I’m referring, of course, not to the 2006 Broadway premiere that occasioned the publicity earthquake of Julia Roberts’ Broadway debut, but the 1997 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, where I saw its unparalleled cast, Clarkson (in even more mesmerizing form), John Slattery and Bradley Whitford.

“Three Days of Rain” was commissioned and first produced by South Coast Repertory. Greenberg, in fact, received more commissions than any other playwright in SCR’s history, 10 of which were produced by the theater, along with other of his plays.

“When we made a commitment to undertake a program to support new American playwrights and produce their work, Richard’s work stood out,” David Emmes, SCR’s co-founding artistic director with the late Martin Benson, said by email. “This was a writer with extraordinary capability who had great potential. Whatever the subject matter, it was always dealt with in an unexpected way, but always brimming with intelligence and wit.”

Patricia Clarkson and John Slattery in the 1997 South Coast Repertory world premiere production of Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain.”

( South Coast Repertory)

The characters in “Three Days of Rain” talk their way into theatrical existence — as much for the audience’s benefit as for their own. The adult children of renowned architects who had tragic lives, they’re struggling to find a path forward from the wreckage of the past. Slattery’s Walker, brilliant and unbalanced, with shades of his mentally ill mother, is the most troubled. He’s a constant source of worry for his sister, Nan (Clarkson), who hasn’t time to dwell on her own fragility with her brother hyper-articulating his nervous breakdowns.

Pip (Whitford), the son of the architectural partner of Walker and Nan’s father, is a daytime television actor who has made peace with being highly successful rather than a genius. His ostentatious well-being is scorned by Walker, who equates equilibrium with compromise. But Pip rebukes Walker for “changing the temperature” of every room by “tyrannical, psychosocial … fiat.”

The play, a diptych, has a second act in which the same actors play the roles of the parents of their first-act characters. Greenberg ironically examines the inscrutability of the past, whose main connection to the present may live in the shared vulnerability to “error” — the final word in this gorgeously written play.

The Broadway revival of “Three Days of Rain,” not being as confidently performed, revealed a common frailty in Greenberg’s dramaturgy — the tendency toward structural abstraction. His plays are held together by thematic ideas James would have put to good use in his novels but are harder to build a dramatic world upon. (Greenberg told me that he dropped out of Harvard’s grad program in English and American literature after not finishing James’ “The Princess Casamassima” for a seminar, but his sensibility was the most Jamesian of all contemporary American playwrights.)

There are two moments in “Three Days of Rain” where conversation on artistic matters reveals quite a bit about Greenberg’s own relationship to his chosen art form. Nan, invoking Goethe (something not anomalous in a Greenberg play), refers to architecture as “frozen music” (a lovely description of the play’s dialogue) and talks about the way a great building contains something that can’t be anticipated by the plan, no matter how scrupulously designed.

Walker, finishing his sister’s point, explains, “There’s an intuition held in reserve, a secret the architect keeps until the building is built.” Something similarly latent inheres in Greenberg’s dramaturgy.

Later, Nan, describing the type of play her mother favored when she first came to New York, allows Greenberg to indulge in some delectable self-irony. She tells Pip that her mother would attend one of those matinees “you could never remember the plot of, where the girl got caught in the rain and had to put on the man’s bathrobe and they sort of did a little dance around each other and fell in love. And there wasn’t even a single good joke, but my mother would walk out after and the city seemed dizzy with this absolutely random happiness.”

That is precisely how I exited Manhattan Theatre Club when I first saw “Three Days of Rain.” My euphoria stemmed as much from the mandarin eloquence of the characters as from the unanticipated magic that can happen when a playwright finds his community of actors.

Greenberg was a prolific writer, which may have been unfairly held against him. I think the bigger issue was that his enormous gifts left many admirers waiting impatiently for his American stage masterpiece, which never quite came together.

“Take Me Out,” about a star baseball player who breaks a cultural taboo by coming out as gay, is the most celebrated of Greenberg’s works. Winner of the Tony for best play in 2003, it also won awards for Joe Mantello’s direction and Denis O’Hare’s performance as gay financial advisor Mason Marzac, who becomes an unlikely rabid baseball fan.

There’s a breathless monologue in which Mason deconstructs the art of baseball as “the perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society.” One of the great theatrical speeches written in the last 25 years, this vertiginous paean to America’s pastime was no doubt a factor in O’Hare’s win. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who was in the Tony-winning 2022 Broadway revival, won a Tony for the same role, a testament to a supple comic performer and an evergreen part.

I admire what Greenberg attempts in “Take Me Out,” though I don’t think he entirely succeeds. It’s not just that the locker-room banter sometimes sounds like a faculty lounge at some competitive liberal arts college. It’s that the swirling ideas of the play and the dramatic construction aren’t a seamless fit.

“The Assembled Parties,” the title of Greenberg’s 2013 Broadway play, is an apt metaphor for the challenge that playwright had in coalescing his sparkling chat-fests into satisfying dramas. So often the whole seemed slightly less than the sum of its scintillating parts.

The smaller canvas of the one-act form allowed Greenberg to hone in his theatrical vision. Perhaps this accounts for the enduring success of “The Author’s Voice,” an early Kafkaesque work that literalizes the divide between an artist’s primitive side that does the grunt creative work and the camera-ready side that basks in the empty glory.

But Greenberg’s disappointments could be worth more than other writers’ triumphs. He wrote magnificently for actors, endowing them with powers of speech that surpass the capacities of most mere mortals. To hear Judith Light, Jessica Hecht, Linda Lavin, Peter Frechette, Slattery or Whitford converse in this heightened theatrical patois was to become instantly spellbound.

Clarkson, in a league of her own, turned the gold of Greenberg’s prose into embodied thought and feeling. But magniloquence was hardly the whole story. The vulnerable sound of Slattery’s delicate stammer in the second half of “Three Days of Rain” and the opinionated maternal astringency of Jenny O’Hara in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” at South Coast Repertory point to the various registers of the playwright’s wide-ranging vocabulary.

Greenberg, a somewhat reclusive personality, stayed away from the spotlight, but was deeply connected to the community of artists who helped him find his voice. Among them, director Evan Yionoulis, another Yale School of Drama classmate, who directed “Three Days of Rain” at Manhattan Theatre Club and shepherded many other of his plays from development to the stage.

“Rich was a gentle man with an acerbic wit,” Yionoulis wrote via email. “A keen observer, he wrote about people negotiating their place in the American landscape. Under his always sparkling dialogue, there is a powerful undercurrent of loneliness and longing that reveals his characters’ aching humanity — and our own.”

The laughter echoes down decades. I can still hear the sisters in “Everett Beekin,” one of those Greenberg’s works I wanted so badly to like more than I did, talking competitively about their upwardly mobile dreams in their mother’s Lower East Side tenement. Greenberg captures the postwar ethos in a single line when one of the sister’s explains to a visitor that her family lives “in Levittown for the time being, but later on, you never know.” Greenberg, a native son of Long Island, encoded his social observations about the frenzied real estate hierarchy in comic language that rarely if ever missed its mark.