When The Rain Stops Falling: Play Review

Blanka Zizka's production of Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling opened at The Wilma Theater last Wednesday night to a packed house and hearts ready to feel and to be filled, drained, and filled again. Or maybe our hearts weren't ready for that, and that's why, a day later, tears well up across both this viewer's eyes thinking of Gabriel and Gabrielle, Elizabeth and Henry, and that damn Andrew.

Without giving much away, the play opens with jaw-dropping artistry. A huddled mass and an individual both move in separate, dynamic directions, lights down, until suddenly the light comes up and the house is greeted. The music and sound effects that accompany this entrance draw you in but hold you at a distance, just close enough to be uncertain of what awaits. This treatment to continue throughout the length of the play—be ready.

The story is woven together as a tapestry, bringing us into the intimate living rooms and roadhouses of mother and son, aging wife and man, a young man and young girl. In each vignette, characters show us who they are, eventually building to how and why they are, too. We follow their suffocated longings, their quests for connection and understanding.

Despite spanning four generations and two continents over several decades, past and future, the symmetry laced throughout the play never feels forced or decorative. Symmetry of sentiment, symmetry of habit, and symmetry of the patterns that make us who we are, from generation to generation. The symmetry can provide texture and levity in one moment—warm feelings for the audience just when we needed something to smile about—and hit you at your core in another.

Zizka's artistic direction beautifully plays with all three dimensions of the stage, and in no scene are the players static. Members of the cast constantly move in patterns that quickly become predictable but never boring—on the contrary, the repetitive motions become a safety, a life raft for the audience to process the unfolding drama and enjoy the spatial texture.

These are the reasons we live. These are the reasons we keep searching the past for the future. Andrew Bovell wrote a beautiful and heartbreaking tale of family and self, and Blanka Zizka and the Wilma HotHouse cast bring it to life in a way that appeals to every sense and nerve. Go see When the Rain Stops Falling, but be ready to experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. Be ready.

When the Rain Stops Falling runs until November 6 at the Wilma Theater. 

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Hannah Litvin is a diasporic Texan and poet living in Philadelphia by way of New York. She spends her time debating between stainless steel or nonstick pans. She is @ComicallyLarge on Twitter.