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When the Rain Stops Falling
Reviewed by Steven Mikulan
City Garage
Through Nov. 23
People in Andrew Bovell’s play talk a lot about the weather but don’t do anything about it. Perhaps that’s because they have all been touched, in varying degrees, by a dark family secret that takes on the dimensions of mythic tragedy. When the Rain Stops Falling, which is receiving its Los Angeles premiere at City Garage, begins when a middle-aged man named Gabriel York (David E. Frank) has a fish fall from the sky at his feet, in the year 2039.
Fish are virtually extinct by then and reports of the Earth’s rising sea levels suggest an even more ominous kind of endgame. Nevertheless, Gabriel happily prepares his unexpected catch as a meal for the visiting son he has not seen since Andrew (Andrew Loviska) was a boy. From here, the multigenerational play ricochets back and forth between 2039 and 1959 and years in between, and between London and Australia, before finally coming to rest where the story began. By then we may not be any wiser about that falling fish, but we definitely know how Andrew came to Gabriel’s door.
What makes Rain so compelling a domestic fable is its tantalizing opaqueness – we don’t know where the members of the York and Law families work, why they continually walk in from the rain with jaunty remarks about Bangladesh, quote Diderot or read books about the decline and fall of the American empire. Nor do we know why it is always raining and the autodidact Henry Law (George Villas) is obsessed with natural disasters – but we’re eager to follow the clues. Bovell eventually brings the marital desertions, accidental deaths and specters of both Alzheimer’s disease and climate change into an ill-starred alignment of destinies. The crux is the revelation of a crime committed by one of the more thoughtful, amiable folk whose whimsies have entertained us to this point.
This sometimes maddening, often beautiful play keeps us asking for more until that disclosure, which is so clinically – almost litigiously – presented that it flattens the delicate narrative that we had, up until then, been piecing together from hints in the dialogue. The story never recovers its momentum and, in a two-hour play without an intermission, that becomes deadly – for the play and this production, directed by Frédérique Michel. Until that point, we had been willing to overlook the interludes of portentous choreography Michel weaves in and out of the play, as well as the fact that the cast’s accents, when they can be detected at all, are all over the place, and that some of the performances are tentative at best. We’ve forgiven these flaws because, until that moment, the actors embraced the frailties of four generations of Yorks and Laws with a touching empathy. To be sure, this is an ambitious project and, certainly, the show’s technical achievements are strong: Charles A. Duncombe’s austere, tiered set design gives physical clarity to the production; Paul Rubenstein’s rain drip soundtrack soothes us at first, but by play’s end becomes a form of water torture; and Anthony Sanazzaro’s video design, which alternates between images of raindrops and the surging sea, is always hypnotic.
City Garage at Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; through Nov. 23. (310) 453-9939, https://www.citygarage.org
