What’s it like when everything you think you know about your life is slowly slipping away? Extraordinary stage and film actor Frank Langella and the cast of The Father explore the frightening realities of dementia in this gripping play by French playwright Florian Zeller (translation by Christopher Hampton).
Presented by Manhattan Theatre Club and directed by Doug Hughes, The Father tells the story of 80-year-old André (Langella), who, after refusing to get along with a series of home healthcare aides, has moved in with his daughter, Anne (Kathryn Erbe), and her boyfriend, Pierre (Brian Avers). Anne is attempting to help her father, whose mind is failing, while trying to live her own life, but she is constantly at odds with him about his refusal to be helped, his denial about his health, and his paranoia about being sent to a nursing home.
Langella expertly portrays a man going through the various stages of Alzheimer’s, from innocently forgetting where he left his watch, to not recognizing his own daughter (in one scene Anne is played by a different actress, Kathleen McNenny, to disorient both André and the audience), to completely losing all sense of who he is. The progression is heartbreaking, as the audience often sees through André’s illness into the kind of charming, erudite man he once was and is desperately clinging onto. His brain in one moment seems sharp, like when he meets his new aide, Laura (Hannah Cabell), and dim a moment later, like when he forgets he was an engineer and insists he used to be a tap dancer.
The progression is also quite terrifying, especially when the play slips into something of a psychological thriller where the audience can’t tell, along with André, what is real and what is a spectre of his fractured mind. Is Anne really moving to London to live with Pierre, or is she staying like she insists? Did Anne and Pierre move themselves into André’s flat, or is André living in their flat? Who is the mysterious man (Charles Borland) and why is André afraid of him? Where in the world is André’s other daughter, Elise, and why hasn’t he heard from her lately?
To add to the confusion, the set (Scott Pask) goes dark after each scene, and strobe lights (Donald Holder) and loud music (Fitz Patton) are employed to distract the audience and create a synaptic, almost fragmented, effect. The scenes are nonlinear and change as they are played over and again depending on where André’s mind is and what his failing memory is telling him. The audience never really knows what is actually happening and this, along with Langella’s powerful performance, allows them to empathize with André until the very end.
The Father is a remarkably well-done portrait of a man losing his mind to Alzheimer’s and the limits of one family’s ability to deal with that horrible disease that gives an interesting perspective on what it feels like to no longer be able to rely on your own memory.
