Summary:
This annotation is based on a live performance presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New
York City that ran between April and June of 2016. The play was nominated for a 2016 Tony Award for best play, and Frank Langella won the 2016 Tony Award for best
performance by an actor in a leading role in a play. In supporting roles were
Kathryn Erbe, Brian Avers, Charles Borland, Hannah Cabell, and Kathleen
McNenny.
The Father is the story of an older man with
Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his
own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing
home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright,
Florian Zeller, who told The Guardian
(2015), “The Father is about an old man lost in the labyrinth of his mind.” The
objective of the play is to bring audience members into the actual dementia
experience so that rather than witnessing André’s disorientation they feel his disorientation.
The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience
experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated
scene sequences, and time loops as contexts for various symptom manifestations
like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take
place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat,
and a nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the
supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In
different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the
audience.
Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him
she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of
the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had
moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other
scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts
time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the
disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a
given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with
the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted
for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s
hallucinations.
The play does not keep audience members in a
perpetual state of confusion and despondency. Farcical elements are peppered
throughout that produce occasional laughs, such as when Anne contests André’s
account of a previous conversation, he suggests it’s she who has the memory
problem:
“You’ve forgotten. Listen, Anne, I have a feeling
you sometimes suffer from memory loss. You do, I’m telling you. It’s worrying
me. Haven’t you noticed?”
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