NEW YORK – Julia Roberts has been ordered by a New York judge to stay at least three hundred feet from the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, where Three Days of Rain, the play in which Ms. Roberts made her Broadway debut last Wednesday, is being presented.
The restraining order was granted yesterday at the request of several drama critics who claimed that Ms. Roberts’ continued presence in the play constitutes “a clear, grave, and immediate threat” not only to the welfare of the production itself but also to that of innocent theater goers.
“We are filing because we can no longer accept (Ms. Roberts’) wooden, self-
conscious, tedious performance and must stop her from inflicting further injury on the play and its audience,” said the critics in papers filed in New York Superior Court.
“We are disappointed that the situation has deteriorated to the point that it has become necessary to seek the assistance of the court,” the critics continued, “but we have come to the conclusion that despite Ms. Roberts’ success in Hollywood, she can’t act very well at all. Obviously, our primary concern must be the welfare of the theater and its patrons.”
Ms. Roberts issued a statement of her own yesterday, calling the critics’ allegations “an immature and transparent smear campaign designed to hurt and embarrass me in front of Oprah Winfrey, James Lipton, and all my other fans, great and small. The people who came to see this play came because they like me, and they’re going to continue to like me no matter what the critics say.”
Despite the restraining order against Ms. Roberts, the show will go on with her understudy taking her place.
The reaction to the restraining order against Ms. Roberts’ has been mixed among her peers. Denzel Washington, with whom Ms. Roberts appeared in 1993’s The Pelican Brief, called the critics’ action “a shameful example of Jim Crow in reverse.”
Russell Crowe, whom Ms. Roberts campaigned against in 2001 when he lost the best actor Oscar to Mr. Washington, said Mr. Roberts’ performance in Three Days of Rain was so bad “she ought to have phoned it in.”
In other news, in his weekly radio address President George W. Bush blamed “movies like American Dreamz” for his declining popularity.
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