The Rainmaker

by N. Richard Nash, directed by Jamie Horton
Commonweal Theatre (August 3, 2009)

Starbuck thunders into the Curry family’s kitchen midway through the first act of the Commonweal’s production of The Rainmaker and disrupts a heated family argument and instantly heightens the divisions within the family. And once the rainmaker enters their lives, things will not be the same.

The rainmaker character is a familiar trope for modern theater goers: a stranger enters a stable community and shakes things up, leaving the people forever changed. This familiarity with the trope along with the 50 years that have passed since the original staging of he play could certainly work against a successful modern staging of The Rainmaker. But the Commonweal’s staging of the play is compelling and fresh—the story itself may be old, but the fears and insecurities, hopes and dreams have not lost their power to move an audience. And when done well, as the company has done here, audiences are still attracted to a mysterious stranger and the ordinary people who fall under the stranger’s spell.

Adam Whisner’s Starbuck proves both threatening and seductive as his confident and erratic behavior throws the Curry family off guard and, remarkably, prepares them for his sales pitch. Brandishing an ominous, yet ridiculously crude, magic wand, Whisner, as the consummate salesman/con man, sells to what each member of the family needs.

Starbuck has done his homework. He has cased the Curry’s farm and knows what shape the cattle are in and how many have already succumbed to the drought. But he has also assessed the conditions inside the home. While playwright Nash lets the audience know about Starbuck’s external intelligence gathering, the Commonweal production has him eavesdropping outside the kitchen door. Because of the slatted back wall, the audience can see a shadow of a person outside the wall, but until his entrance, the audience isn’t sure if they are seeing a stage hand or just the shadow of another character. But from his vantage outside the door, Starbuck is able to learn that the family has been trying to find a husband for Lizzie, that an expected suitor had not shown up for dinner, that the simple minded Jimmy is regularly bullied by his older brother, and much more. In short, he has gathered enough information to know what motivates his customers. And for a good sales person, knowing a customer’s motivation makes the sale all the more likely.

The play’s main tension is between the outlaw Starbuck and the family’s self anointed keeper, Noah. Nash has drawn Noah as a one dimensional character who uses numbers and logic to shield his family from possible embarrassment and disappointment. Carl Lindberg is able to fill out the role nicely, creating a character fuller than Nash penned and anchoring the hard boiled side of the battle. Named with a bit of irony, Noah represents drought and a lifeless, passionless, and pragmatic life. But Nash has tipped his hand a bit by creating Starbuck as the more dynamic character. While Noah represents the stability of a drought, Starbuck represents the volatility of rain. But the battle between the competing views of life are fought not directly between these two men but within the hearts and minds of Noah’s siblings, Jimmy and Lizzie.

Starbuck sees a repressed life force in both Lizzie and Jimmy, and as the salesman, he is selling to that repression. While Jimmy is an easy sell, Lizzie is much more complicated. She is moving toward an acceptance of what she sees as the hand that life has dealt her. Starbuck is determined that she should strive for more. While the choices and attitudes over a young woman’s imminent spinsterhood have changed considerably over the more than 50 years since the play was written, there is enough that holds true in the cultural attitudes and social realities for Lizzie’s fears to remain powerfully relevant.

Adrienne Sweeney is able to convey the embarrassment of being shopped out by her well-meaning family and the pain of hearing her person discussed like a piece of cattle. Her description of her fate as the spinster aunt is simply heartbreaking in its truth and seeming inevitability.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable and dated (well, perhaps not so dated if it still makes us uncomfortable) message of the play is the empowerment that both Jimmy and Lizzie experience after their individual sexual encounters. Is Nash echoing a boorish male bravado that says a woman simply needs a good roll in the hay to set herself right? Certainly Nash is siding with the belief that natural life forces, including sex, are inherently healthy and that repression of these life forces is unhealthy—and sex is a convenient symbol of this life force. Interestingly, it is only Noah who finds anything objectionable in Lizzie’s late night meeting with Starbuck. Even her father, the laid-back H.C. Curry (played this evening by the even more laid-back Hal Cropp) protects his daughter’s privacy with a man Curry knows to be a con man, probably not “the marrying kind.”

While droughts kills slowly, rains can devastate in an instant. Jimmy seems to have chosen to embrace the storm, whatever it brings, but Lizzie begins to see that she may have other options, options that she may not have been able to see before she learned that she could embrace the storm.

While the audience is most concerned with what will happen to Lizzie, the story of the Rainmaker is Starbuck’s. He has proved the consummate salesman. He has made his sale and has collected his money. But his real thrill comes from watching his own skill at maneuvering people to see that what he is selling is the thing that they most need.

The Commonweal’s The Rainmaker is both a thought provoking drama about human fears and repressions and a playful look at our fascination with men and women who make big promises, feed our biggest dreams, and play on our biggest fears. Most of us are either living in fear that a rainmaker will shake up our life or in hope that our own rainmaker will make us an offer.

The Rainmaker plays in repertory with The Odd Couple through October 24.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre