POOR ZELDA FITZGERALD! Her name is cast about all over film and television as quick 'n' lazy shorthand for "drunken, unhinged lady from below the Mason-Dixon line." When a character brings up old Zelda Fitzgerald—as one does in Portland Center Stage's new production of Three Days of Rain—it's almost always a universal signifier that bitches be crazy, and not, you know, bitches be writing underappreciated short stories.

This is too bad for Zelda Fitzgerald, but mostly it's too bad for us. Because it's symptomatic of a larger problem with the way mental illness is often framed in pop culture—with a depressing tendency to treat female psychological pain with jokey, offhand literary allusions (see: the legend of Zelda Fitzgerald), while men's struggles with mental illness are often given more care and reverence (see: F. Scott).

This irritating duality rears its insidious head in Richard Greenberg's 1997 play, Three Days of Rain. It's an interestingly structured play about male genius and female hysteria: Walker (Silas Weir Mitchell) and Nan Janeway (Lisa Datz), who've grown up in the shadow of their father's iconic architecture and their mother's madness, find themselves in one of those classic "Who gets the house?!" storylines after their father dies, and his version of the Robie House is left to his former business partner's son, now a bubbly TV star (the oh-so-classically-handsome Sasha Roiz). You can probably guess the rest: old wounds! Catharsis! Monologuin'!

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