The failure of ''Three Days" can't completely be tied to Roberts's inability to find her way into the neuroses of a pretty complicated woman. (Actually, two pretty complicated women.) Even the reliable Paul Rudd seems lost in Joe Mantello's wimpy restaging of Richard Greenberg's drama.
Greenberg's play was a deserved Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, losing out to Paula Vogel's ''How I Learned to Drive." In 1997 the Manhattan Theatre Club delivered a stunning production, featuring Patricia Clarkson and John Slattery. Bostonians were treated to a fine version by SpeakEasy Stage Company with Dee Nelson and Diego Arciniegas.
What gets lost in set designer Santo Loquasto's cavernous loft on Broadway, besides intimacy, is the sense that Greenberg is offering sharp insight into family dysfunction rather than tossing off amusing one-liners.
Walker (Rudd) and Nan (Roberts) are the children of a renowned architect, who has recently died, and a wife who is described as Zelda Fitzgerald's even more unstable sister. Walker is furious at his closed-down father, and he thinks an entry in a journal he's just found, reading ''three days of rain," is all anyone needs to know about dear-old uncommunicative dad.
Nan, meanwhile, is furious at Walker for his bohemian, irresponsible ways. She's tired of his problems and doesn't even care that he has found the journal in the loft where he's now living, the place in which Dad and Mom met and conceived an architectural breakthrough. Also on the scene is Pip (Bradley Cooper), son of Dad's business partner.
All three of the actors are more or less cast against type in the first act, but Cooper is the only one to carry it off. He was the bad guy in ''Wedding Crashers" and here is the good friend bending over backward to bring Walker out of his funk. Rudd is usually the straight arrow in film and theater but is not a convincingly wacky Walker. Roberts, a cinematic ball of fire, wanders around the stage in the first act as if she's looking for the Prozac.
Such extreme performances help to differentiate the actors from their second-act characters -- the parents, back in 1960 -- but again, only Cooper is believable.
