Kate Blumberg
photo by T. Charles Erickson

More often than no, the question of whether a reviewer is automatically tasked with making sense of the production he or she attends or is best confined to charting the territory presented, leaving the audience individually and collectively to find its/their own way. That’s the situation we confront with When the Rain Stops Falling, Andrew Bovell’s compelling, confusing new play. Firstly, it’s not just simply chronicling what takes place, where and when. Bovell ‘s characters and story “moves back and forth in time between 1959 and 2039…in London, England and Adelaide, Alice Springs, Ayers Rock and the Coorong in Australia”, none of it consecutively or linearly. We are also presented with the same characters at different ages, back and forth in their lives, sometimes simultaneously in time and place. The only constant over the eighty years of the play is the rain, which is to stop in 2039 with the end of the world. The accompanying gloom, however, is inconstant, in depth and severity. Just always there.

Covering the entire ceiling over the unique Newhouse stage, designer David Korins has hung many gray hued tarpaulins, like a sky full of rainy mammary clouds, some fitfully lit, some quite black over a polished wet looking complex of turn tables. A few furniture pieces, anonymous, signifying any place, every place, all of it invisible in the thunder and lightning of technical designers Fitz Patton and Tyler Micoleau’s spectacular thunderstorm which opens the play and the spectacular monologue Michael Siberry launches at us trying to explain his utterly miserable life shaken to the core by the impending visit of his son and when a huge fish falls from the sky, he sees omens. And food. Fish is very expensive, the oceans having been plundered of edible fish. There’s to be something for the two of them to eat after all.

This old man is Gabriel York. That much is clear. He is the son of Gabrielle York and Gabriel Law, not clear at all until you find the young Gabrielle and the young Gabriel Law in their meetings in Australia, much earlier, young Gabriel having left London to search for his father. He was never told by his mother why his father left, never came back. This is a pattern he knows nothing about. We discover in earlier flashbacks why Henry, his father, was banished from his house by his mother. Other scenes find the answers in Henry’s uncontrollable pedophilia. Gabriel York’s son, Andrew Price, knows nothing of this intertwined family history. Playwright Bovell’s deliberate complications with his Gabriel’s and Gabrielles, older and younger are further entangled when the oldest Gabriel reveals at the outset that he had wanted to name his son Joe after an old friend. And that Joe marries Gabrielle York, much to his and her dismay and years of pain. Another parallel in the intertwined lives of these families.

Staging such an intricately conceived play requires almost a mulishly stubborn tenacity as well as steadfastness and clarity and a bit of genius in the director as well as a mulishly stubborn and devoted capable cast. He has to relate the elements of the families together and still maintain their relationships within the signs of a decaying world, know they are products of that world, inheritors of that world. Director David Cromer has inspired his company to keep the vision if not the faith. They are wonderful. Particularly impressive were Victoria Clark, Michael Siberry, Rod McLachlan, Richard Topol.

Mitzi Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center at 65^th Street. Tickets: $85. Tue-Sat 8 pm, Mats Wed, Sat 2 pm, Sun 3 pm. 212-239-6200