‘The Father’ Examines the Lion’s Mind in Winter
Ben BrantleyApril 14, 2016: He is a fortress unto himself, but a fortress under siege. The title character in Florian Zeller’s cold-eyed, harrowing “The Father,” which opened on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is often found in barricade position. He is an elegant old man, first seen dressed in stony shades of gray, seated obdurately in a gray chair, arms folded defensively. He is holding down the fort of his identity. Everything about his posture says, “Trespass at your own risk.” But because this man — his name is André — is played by Frank Langella, one of the most magnetic theater actors of his generation, there’s no way you’re going to honor his wish for privacy. Before you know it, you’ve walked straight into his head, and what a lonely, frightening, embattled place it is. “The Father,” which has already picked up a war chest of trophies for its French author and its leading men in productions in Paris and London, operates from an exceedingly ingenious premise. It’s one that seems so obvious, when you think about it, that you’re surprised that it hasn’t been done regularly onstage. That’s presenting the world through the perspective of a mind in an advancing state of dementia, making reality as relative and unfixed as it might be in a vintage Theater of the Absurd production. So, as in a play by Eugene Ionesco or the young Edward Albee or Harold Pinter, our hero finds himself in the company of people he is told he knows intimately, but whom he does not recognize. The same is true of the locations he inhabits, which are rarely what he assumes they are. (Or aren’t they?)
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