Wet dream

Williamstown revives The Rainmaker

by Steve Vineberg

THE RAINMAKER, by N. Richard Nash. Directed by Scott Ellis. Set design by James Noone. Costumes by Jess Goldstein. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Music by Louis Rosen. With Jayne Atkinson, Christopher Meloni, John Bedford Lloyd, David Aaron Baker, Jerry Hardin, Randle Mell, and Bernie McInerney. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, through August 2.

The N. Richard Nash play The Rainmaker has been, from the very first, a crowd pleaser. It was a hit on Broadway in 1954, with Geraldine Page as the Midwestern spinster Lizzie Curry and Darren McGavin as the self-invented con man, Starbuck, who gets her farmer papa to hire him to conjure rain in a drought and ends up raining sexual jubilation on Lizzie's parched heart. Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster took over these roles in the 1956 movie version, and their performances made it justly famous. And on press night at the Williamstown Theatre Festival revival, the audience cheered for the final-curtain rain -- an irresistible stage effect -- and for the melodrama's old-fashioned theatrics.

There's no denying that Nash is a craftsman, even if his dramaturgy is sadly worn. Every character in The Rainmaker stands on one side or the other of the line between life-affirming hope and life-denying pragmatism. Loving, optimistic H.C. Curry (Jerry Hardin) sends his daughter Lizzie (Jayne Atkinson) to another town to be courted by the sons of an old family friend. When she returns home, single and defeated, her brother Noah (John Bedford Lloyd) tells her she's plain and that it's time she faced the fact that she'll never land a husband. This is after the only eligible man in town, the divorced deputy sheriff File (Randle Mell), has resisted the Curry men's attempt to get him to come by for dinner and take a closer look at Lizzie. Noah also bullies his kid brother Jim (David Aaron Baker), who's hot to spark a young woman Noah thinks is wild and sure trouble. And he's the only holdout when the self-professed rainmaker Starbuck (Christopher Meloni) comes by, selling his dreams.

Scott Ellis's production can't disguise the thinness of Nash's dramatic conception -- or his one tactical error, which is to make File such a dullard that what should be an inevitable romantic conclusion comes across instead as a puzzlement. But Williamstown's The Rainmaker is so gorgeous to behold -- credit the work of set designer James Noone and lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski -- and so skillfully performed that even a cynic might be tempted to join in the cheers at the end of the evening. Director Ellis (who was responsible for the prime revival of She Loves Me at the Roundabout in New York a few seasons back) gives the production a slightly stylized, roughhewn-Americana feel; he slips up only in two fight scenes, which are messy and hyperactive. And he's marvelous with the actors, especially Hardin and Lloyd, neither of whose work I've cared for much in the past. Hardin, best known to TV audiences as one of the boring gray company men in the "mythology" episodes of The X-Files, acts with authentic feeling here. The rangy, big-boned Lloyd is terrific -- it's hard to imagine an actor doing more with the role of Noah Curry. And David Aaron Baker is tremendously appealing as his opposite number, the randy dreamer Jim.

Christopher Meloni brings some charm and wit to the role of Starbuck, though his physical unimaginativeness leashes him in a couple of key scenes. (Meloni is also a familiar face to TV watchers: he was the creep that Kim Delaney, going undercover, had to date last season on NYPD Blue.) But he's adequate to squire the Lizzie Curry of that splendid actress Jayne Atkinson. Katharine Hepburn conquered the masochism inherent in this role by the most direct means: she embraced it with her whole heart. It was a magical ugly-duckling performance: when Burt Lancaster's Starbuck told her she was pretty, Hepburn smiled back at him and, by God, she was suddenly, unstoppably beautiful. Atkinson doesn't have Hepburn's big, theatrical moves; she's such a modest performer that it's the integrity of her acting that pulls you into the character (and sidesteps the masochism). When Starbuck swears she's pretty, Atkinson's Lizzie makes you feel her desperate need for his perception to be true -- the one truth that's somehow escaped everyone else she's ever known. Atkinson's triumph is very different from Hepburn's, but it's a triumph nonetheless. It justifies not only the audience's cheers but Williamstown's decision to revive this silly, schematic old warhorse.