Manhattan Theatre Club
With elements of a thriller and absurdist comedy,the play takes us into the experience of a man losing his grip – though some very English slang ranklesAndré (Frank Langella), a former engineer, and lives in a luxurious apartment in Paris,furnished with mementoes of his work and travels. It’s an urbane, elegant space, and 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, and 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 approximately dementia, and though that word is never spoken,nor are any of its cognates. Instead the play, now under the confident direction of Doug Hughes, or 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.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com