The right way to watch a movie star on stage, presumably, is to try to ignore the pulsating glow of Hollywood celebrity and focus instead on the acting. But that isn't easy when the star is Julia Roberts. For a start, there are the fans who have been jamming the streets outside the theatre during previews; then there are the police on horseback, struggling to keep calm. The Broadway debut of the most bankable woman in cinema history is proving to be not so much a play as a major public order challenge.
Inside the auditorium the challenges are different. Richard Greenberg's three-hander is certainly no star vehicle for Roberts. If anything, it's a vehicle for Paul Rudd, playing Walker Janeway, the drifting and restless son of recently deceased superstar architect Ned Janeway, who designed "all - yes, all - of the most famous buildings of the last 30 years".
Walker and his uptight sister Nan (Roberts) have returned to the family's gloomy New York loft for the execution of Ned's will, and to try to understand the emotionally absent parents they never knew. "My father was more or less silent; my mother was more or less mad," Walker explains. "They married because by 1960 they had reached a certain age and they were the last ones left in the room."
The discovery of their father's journal seems to offer some clues, but its cryptic entries lead only to a night of confrontations with Pip (Bradley Cooper), the son of Ned's architectural partner, who is now a daytime TV actor, apparently untroubled by the introspection that eats at Walker and Nan.
Rudd's presence is so frenetic that Roberts struggles to shine until the play's second half, set in 1960, when the same actors play their characters' parents, revealing an unexpected story of love and guilt that both explains and belies their children's impression of them as chilly and uncaring.
Greenberg's theme is how our parents' lives are closed to us: Walker, Nan and Pip have left the play, never to return, by the time we understand how things really unfolded. But all the subtlety of emotion is granted to the male characters. Roberts is at her best (as in films such as Pretty Woman or My Best Friend's Wedding) when her southern charm is offset against an undercurrent of sly satire, even malice. As Ned's wife Lina, she seems just crazy - "sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald's less stable sister," as Walker puts it.
Even so, Three Days of Rain is a compelling and frequently hilarious evening: Greenberg's hyper-literate dialogue sees to that. But the actors fail to convince us that their troubles are more than rich-kid angst. The most completely authentic emotion on display was the teenagers outside and the cops shouting at them to get back on the sidewalk.
· Until June 18. Box office: (212) 239-6200.
