HAPPILY married nearly four years now, with 16-month-old twins to brighten her life, Julia Roberts hasn’t worked much in the last two years. “I needed,” she says, “an exemplary reason to leave the house.”
What fit the bill was the chance to make her stage debut in Richard Greenberg’s acclaimed play “Three Days of Rain,” which, with Roberts heading up the cast, has become the most sought-after ticket on Broadway.
The production, which also stars Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper, opens next week at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
“My family is very fulfilling and interesting to me,” Roberts told The Post, in her first interview since the play began previews two weeks ago.
“And for me to step away from that for any period of time, I was going to have to do something that was really different and challenging.”
Nestled between her co-stars in a booth at a popular theater bar, sipping a post-performance glass of red wine and munching tortilla chips and guacamole, Roberts says she’d long wanted to appear onstage but didn’t find the right vehicle until her agent put her in touch with Joe Mantello, the Tony Award-winning director of “Wicked” and “The Odd Couple,” who suggested “Three Days of Rain.”
“Joe really lured me into this,” she says. “It’s one of his favorite plays. We had a long conversation about it,
and he made it all seem so vibrant and exciting.”
Produced off-Broadway almost 10 years ago, “Three Days of Rain,” is a sensitive, elegantly written drama about a brother and sister who, in the course of going over their father’s will, attempt to make some sense of their parents’ lives and, ultimately, their own.
Roberts plays the sister, Nan, a tense woman who is concerned about her unstable brother, Pip (Rudd).
Cooper plays their superficial but charming friend, whose father was in business with Nan and Pip’s dad.
In the second act, the actors play the parents, with Roberts tackling the very demanding role of Lina, a bourbon-swilling Southern woman on the verge of madness.
Roberts, Cooper and Rudd all say that while it is exhilarating to perform a play as complex as “Three Days of Rain,” it’s grueling work.
“The writing is beatuiful and dense,” says Cooper, who has appeared in the movies “Wedding Crashers” and “Failure to Launch” and who, like Roberts, is making his stage debut.
“Sometimes there are sentences that will last four lines in the script. Richard uses words that I don’t even know the meaning of. Making it all seem natural is very difficult.”
Rudd, the only cast member with stage experience (critics raved about his performances in “Bash” and “The Shape of Things”), says: “Richard is like Tom Stoppard. You watch his plays and you think, ‘A big brain wrote this.’ But it engages you, and it makes you feel smarter than you are.”
Adds Roberts: “I go home to my husband” – Danny Moder – “every night and I tell him that I have so much work to do. I love being an actor, but sometimes doing this I feel as though I’ve gone back to square one.”
Roberts’ appearance on Broadway has become the biggest event of the spring theater season.
The show’s limited, 12-week run is practically sold out, with even VIP seats priced at $250 hard to come by.
Every night, at least 100 fans stand outside the stage door waiting to catch a glimpse of Hollywood’s top female box-office draw.
Roberts is causing such a stir on Broadway, that the owners of the bar where this interview was conducted asked that its name not be printed.
Word got out one night that she was there after the show, and a pack of 50 fans mobbed the entrance.
Although Roberts has scant stage experience, the theater runs in her blood.
Both her parents were actors and, when she was a child, they ran a theater school in Atlanta.
“I grew up with the smell of greasepaint on me,” she says. “My dad used to take me to plays all the time. We came to New York when I was 7, and we saw ‘Hair.’ I also have vivid memories of seeing Yul Brynner do ‘The King and I’ in Atlanta.”
More recently, Roberts was captivated by the performance of her friend Cherry Jones (they appeared together in “Erin Brockovich”) in the hit play “Doubt.”
Jones, a real sweetheart offstage, won a Tony last year playing a ruthless, take-no-prisoners mother superior.
“I went backstage after seeing her performance, and she was just sweet, wonderful Cherry,” says Roberts. “How she transformed himself [into that character] was inconceivable to me. I can conceive of it a bit more now, but at the time it seemed like a magic trick to me.”
As she begins to settle into the rhythms of life in the theater – and, she hopes, make a little magic of her own, onstage – Roberts, the stage novice, remains struck by how unreal performing in front of 1,100 people every night can sometimes seem.
“I come off stage and I feel like I’ve just been in a Fellini movie,” she says. “It feels like we all have on crazy hats.”
michael.riedel@nypost.com
