Wilma's 'Rain': A thunderous warning to the world

The Wilma Theater's production of Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling is like one of those old photo albums you run across in antiques shops, but better. Instead of staring at the images, wondering who they were, where they lived, and what happened to land them discarded in a pile of junk, we trace the tragic histories of two families, the Yorks and the Laws, over two continents and 80 years.

But there's also something larger at work. When the play begins, we're in the near future, the year 2039, and it rains, always. Paradoxically, fish are said to be extinct (though there are rumors one can still be had for the right price). Nonetheless, one fateful day in Alice, Australia, a big, healthy specimen drops from the sky at the feet of Gabriel York.

The theme here, past as prologue, echoes throughout. Since 1959, people have been "drowning in Bangladesh" - so often, in fact, that the line "People are drowning in Bangladesh" has become just one of those things you say when it's raining. Of course, all along, those swelling riverbanks were a faraway ecological warning that nobody heeded until it was too late.

Bovell, an Australian playwright, shows shades of Stoppard in his time-hopping, philosophy-inflected, family-tree-cum-travelogue, which certainly fits both the Wilma's and director Blanka Zizka's aesthetic and production history. Zizka allows the story to take center stage, a stage whose design, by Matt Saunders, is spare - some wooden chairs, a black floor, off-white stucco wall - until the action moves outdoors.

The story leaps from London to Australia's Coorong, an area with a 512-square-mile national park and the famed Ayers Rock, which figures prominently in the plot. When the characters are there, Saunders projects a star-filled night sky and the Ayers Rock's distinctive red peak above the set's back wall. It's a beautiful transition.

This excellent cast, an ensemble filled with members of Wilma's HotHouse - its new resident acting company - and other local favorites (including Lindsay Smiling, Keith Conallen, Melanye Finister, and Brian Ratcliffe), takes their time unspooling their tale, allowing pain to accumulate until it also floods the stage.

Not all of Bovell's through-lines pan out. Intergenerational servings of fish soup and talk of the future calling the past seem wedged in to make an unnecessary time-traveling connection. But as a gripping, sometimes astonishing, story and much (occasionally fishy) food for thought, this production stays with you long after the rain onstage stops falling.

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