A few
years ago, a close relative (who is now near 94) had a bout of
spiraling
anxiety I won’t describe in detail, say to save this: it mimicked the
onset and
progression of dementia. It lasted a few months, in which he both
functioned
logically in a day-to-day sense, but was simultaneously convinced of an
ongoing
threat that would eventually take him away from hearth and home. When
he
gradually, almost imperceptibly, came out of it (I’m not even sure he
remembers
it now; but it was a great relief, because once you do go down that particular Yellow Brick Road, you never
return from Oz), my own shrink
and I were able to dissect
it for “tells” indicating that it wasn’t, after all, dementia, but
those were only
detectable in the aftermath.
When you
observe someone experiencing false reality as real, there are no tells, only a deeply troubling conviction
with which you
cannot argue, lest you exacerbate the need for the victim to cling even
more
tenaciously to a belief in his own senses.
So
I was immediately keyed into the game of Florian Zeller’s The Father,
when André (Frank Langella in one of his most affecting performances) is
having a heated discussion with his daughter Anne (Kathryn
Erbe) about his need for home
care—a
need he refutes vigorously—and she leaves the room, only to reappear in
the person of another actress. And that game is an especially bold one.
Simple.
Obvious. Yet to the best of my knowledge, never dramatized this way
before:
dementia from the point of view of its victim. No buffer, no
interpretation, no discussion about the
nature of the
disease or what’s happening to André’s perception of reality. Just
things
changing. And as we progress through each scene, orientation changing.
The
inconsistency of who’s who, which dynamic exists with what person, what
the flat
looks like, whose flat it is.
I
was simultaneously wondering if the audience would get it, or at least get it soon enough; if
there were
enough familiarity with this awful condition, or at least a quick
ability to
understand the awful condition being presented. (I must confess, I
entered the
play cold, knowing nothing of its previous international success.) Not
only did
they understand it, but some were even quite moved by it. And quite
right to
be. What can be more humanly, quietly devastating—and chilling—than
watching a perfectly nice, charming, powerful, irascible,
self-possessed man
quite literally lose his self-possession and dissolve into endless
confusion;
helplessly; with no hope of reversal? I might even cite the play
as…medically
valuable; vital in a documentary sense.
Furthering
this impression is a fine cast under Doug Hughes’ almost-clinical (-seeming) direction.
One
caveat, however, about the play: periodically, André leaves the stage;
and the
remaining characters play out that scene’s variation of his perceived
world.
Intellectually, I understand this: relationships, conspiracies, and
circumstances purportedly developed outside of the patient’s direct
witness are
certainly a part of dementia-borne confabulation. But those scenes
never pay
off later, in anything André says or perceives, by way of accusation or
remembrance. Mr. Zeller may not mean them so, but these scenes play out
like a shift
in POV. Possibly they’re meant
as the audience’s
continuation of André’s
reality-of-the-moment, but at best that’s a literary conceit; in “our”
audience
reality, it breaks verisimilitude. There has to have been a better way
to
conceive them; they seem to have no real function
except to get the lead actor offstage for a while; and I’m not entirely
sure
that’s even technically necessary.
But
that’s a small blip in an important play. Its English translation by
Brit
playwright Christopher Hampton (who has
performed the same function for Yazmina Resa, author of Art, as
well) is pretty impressive
too.
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