André (Frank Langella), a former engineer, lives in a luxurious apartment in Paris, furnished with mementoes of his work and travels. It’s an urbane, elegant space, but André no longer feels comfortable here. His watch disappears and reappears. His elder daughter, Anne (Kathryn Erbe), is around too often or not often enough. Who is the man she brings with her? Her husband? Her lover? And why does his appearance keep changing?
Florian Zeller’s The Father, produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, has aspects of both a thriller and an absurdist comedy, and something more poignant than either. Zeller himself describes it as a “tragic farce”. It is clearly a play about dementia, though that word is never spoken, nor are any of its cognates. Instead the play, now under the confident direction of Doug Hughes, takes us inside André’s experience and asks us to confront his shifting sense of reality without recourse to any diagnosis. (There are a couple of scenes without André, but these seem like missteps.)
The set, lighting and even the costuming conspire nicely to suggest André’s increasingly slippery sense of place and self. Langella, who has terrific force, but doesn’t always seem to pay much attention to the actors around him, responds to this dislocation with petulance, confusion, cruelty and anger, much of it directed at women – the long-suffering Anne and the home health aides who come to care for him. He begins the play suavely enough, dressed in elegant casualwear, but soon devolves into a man whining that he won’t change out of his nightclothes: “I’ll only have to put my pajamas back on tonight, won’t I?” It’s a deterioration Langella clearly relishes.
With the exception of a few unnecessary soliloquies, the dialogue is often powerful in its simplicity and Zeller effectively communicates a sense of existential horror lurking just below everyday chatter. Unfortunately, the translation, by Christopher Hampton, sounds more London-ish than Parisian, particularly in its slang, with phrases like “stick them in my gob” and “getting on everybody’s tits” bound to rankle American ears.
Parts of the play can feel somewhat too pat, as though Zeller is amusing himself in finding out how many ways he can alter reality using the familiar mechanisms of the stage – an audience’s trust of exposition, the faith in representational setting, the tendency to identify a particular character with a single actor. But he dismisses most of this cleverness in an ending that is both sentimental and searing and will probably devastate anyone who has seen a close friend or relative suffer from dementia. The final scene is a terrible and tragic reversion, in which a man of articulacy and power is reduced to a kind of infantilism, left with with no language but a cry.
