Stage to Screen: The Father and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in The Father.

Florian Zeller’s play The Father, about an aging man sinking into dementia, opened in Paris in 2012 and premiered in London at the Tricycle Theatre, in a Christopher Hampton translation, three years later. I saw it there and was impressed by it, and by Kenneth Cranham in the title role. The play is a tricky piece of work: it’s from the point of view of André, the father, whose daughter Anne is struggling to take care of him as he quarrels with one caregiver after another, so we experience the world as he does, even when he doesn’t recognize her or her husband (thus the actors who play these parts are sometimes replaced by other actors), even when the information she gives him seems contradictory because his memory is fading and time, as he perceives it, sometimes doubles back on itself. Yet the style isn’t expressionistic, as one might predict; it’s theatre of the absurd that presents itself as realism. That is, each scene plays as perfect realism; it’s the juxtaposition of scenes that doesn’t make realist sense. (Guy Hoare’s lighting, the only element of the Tricycle production I didn’t like, kept violating this idea by bridging the scenes with blinding flashes of light.)  Watching the play, which transferred to Broadway the following season with Frank Langella as the father, I thought of Arthur Kopit’s 1978 play Wings, which is from the point of view of a woman who has had a stroke, and also of fragments of old Twilight Zone episodes and of Pinter’s plays, especially the early ones. The difference between Zeller’s approach and Pinter’s is that Zeller isn’t reconfiguring banal conversation to reveal the cracks underneath in order to suggest the absurdity of human interaction; the cracks in The Father address a more essential – less manufactured – mystery, that of a consciousness coming apart. 

New Works for the Theatre: The Michaels, The Height of the Storm and Admissions

Brenda Wehle and Charlotte Bydwell in The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times is Richard Nelson’s first play since he directed his own translation, with the wizardly translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, of Uncle Ványa in the Hunter Theatre Project a year ago. Now he’s back at the Public, where he presented (also as both playwright and director) his tetralogy The Apple Family Plays and his trilogy The Gabriels, and like those plays – and like Uncle Ványa – the style is what you might call conversational realism. The venue is LuEsther Hall, the smallest space at the Public, and those of us who didn’t obtain a listening device in the lobby leaned in to listen as soon as the actors had created the set out of piled-up tables, chairs and benches, rolled-up rugs and props laid out in trays. Then the lights come up and Jay O. Sanders, as David Michael, a producer and arts manager, tells the assembled kitchen in his ex-wife Rose’s Rhinebeck house about having to appear in place of an ailing actor in his latest show. He describes what it was like to experience the sacred performance space actors and dancers claim that isn’t normally open to mere producers. (Rhinebeck, in upstate New York, is also the setting of The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels.)

Comedies: The Chinese Room, How the Other Half Loves, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

Sue Jean Kim, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Carson Elrod in The Chinese Room. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The Chinese Room by the Irish playwright Michael West, at Williamstown’s Nikos stage, is a sci-fi comedy with serious overtones. Brían F. O’Byrne plays Frank, an inventor of artificial intelligence who discovers that his partner is closing him out of the company they founded together and phasing out some of his creations, “humanoids” like Susannah (Sue Jean Kim), of which Frank keeps the prototype in his house. To preserve the memory that his wife Lily (Laila Robins) is rapidly losing, Frank has transferred it to Susannah. But the combination of Lily’s confusion (she doesn’t remember that she’s at home, and most of the time she doesn’t know who Frank is), the tensions in their marriage that are now being channeled through Susannah’s persona, the bugs in the humanoid model (Susannah keeps faltering and having to be rebooted), and the demands of his little boy, Zack (Elliot Trainor), now exacerbated by his removal from his own company, have turned Frank’s life into chaos. The emissary from Frank’s partner, who arrives to collect the passkey to the system, is a robot known as Daniel (Carson Elrod), and his insistent presence – he’s been programmed not to leave Frank’s house without the item he was sent to retrieve – adds to the mix.