The theatre is a paradoxical place to go in search of empathy. While the actors are up there, working to make us feel, through their acute particularity, what it is to be human, we are down here, elbow to elbow with fidgeting, gum-chewing, symphonically coughing specimens of our own kind. The divide can seem vast—one ringing phone can be enough to make you want to cancel everybody, everywhere—and theatre-makers try to bridge it in all sorts of ways. They deconstruct the stage and break the famous fourth wall, enlisting audience members to participate in the action, to varying degrees of success. (I’m thinking of the radically confrontational ending of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s recent “Fairview”—and also, with pity, of the outraged theatregoer I saw complaining to an usher at Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy,” after one of that production’s numerous displays of simulated swimming-pool coitus left her soaked.) Or they may simply let the story lead, and trust in the power of performance to guide us.
Jonathan Kent’s restrained staging of “The Height of the Storm,” by the French playwright Florian Zeller (a Manhattan Theatre Club production that has arrived at the Samuel J. Friedman after a heralded run in London), is as traditional as they come. The action is set in a grand, slightly shabby home in a suburb of Paris; the house lights are kept down, the audience members stowed safely in their seats, asked only to watch and listen. It is the play itself that lurches and rocks us, addling our expectation of narrative coherence in order to take us inside the sort of experience that can’t be grasped with the mind alone.
That experience belongs to André (Jonathan Pryce), an elderly writer in rapid mental decline. He stands in his kitchen, where the walls are painted a robin’s-egg blue, looking out at a bare tree in his garden. His adult daughter Anne (Amanda Drew) is speaking, though he doesn’t seem to notice her. There was a big storm in the night. Did he hear it? It kept her awake, but she’s been having trouble sleeping anyway, because of “all this.” It seems that Anne, pragmatic and weary, has come to help her father organize his affairs. There is interest in publishing his diaries, if he agrees. Then, there’s the matter of the house, which may not be “what the situation calls for.” Anne has asked a real-estate agent to come by and have a little chat about selling. At this, André comes alive. He has an unstoppable tremor in his right hand, but when provoked he can still boom with Old Testament fury. And yet he seems to be in a state of confused denial—about, we presume, the recent death of his wife of some fifty years, Madeleine, whom Anne speaks of in the past tense.
Suddenly, here is the missing woman herself, briskly returning from a round of grocery shopping with Anne’s flighty sister, Élise (Lisa O’Hare). Have we misunderstood? Madeleine (Eileen Atkins) doesn’t seem to be a ghost; her daughters speak to her as if nothing were out of the ordinary. At the sight of her, André comes alive again, if differently than before. He laughs and preens; his eyes shine as he teases his “little scorcher,” though Madeleine swats away his flirtatious displays. She has lunch to prepare, and André seems to be coming unstuck again. He can’t remember what day it is, and Anne’s gentle answer—“Today, Dad”—tells us how far gone he really is. Or does it? As her mother chops onions, Anne again discusses the matter of the diaries, only now it is her father whom she speaks of in the past tense, before bursting into tears of grief. Is this an alternative scenario, in which André, not Madeleine, is the dead parent? Or have Anne and Madeleine adopted this callous way of speaking about someone who is present in body but absent in mind—as if he had vanished altogether?
No clear answers are given during this intermissionless, eighty-minute piece. Like André, who is sure of himself one moment, befuddled and pitiful the next, we are plunged into a shadowy, fearful place where reality, memory, and imagination mingle indiscriminately. Motifs are repeated in ways that contradict rather than amplify; the pauses between acts don’t so much reset the action as muddle it, and us, further. (Hugh Vanstone’s subtle lighting design does provide some clues as to who is flesh and who is figment.) The moments of greatest lucidity, like a quiet, companionable conversation between husband and wife at the kitchen table, may prove to be the most delusional, if they are, as increasingly seems to be the case, wishful fantasies that André uses to moor himself. But fantasy is not a bad place to go when reality proves unbearable. From the outside, dealing with dementia is a heartbreaking, exasperating task. I cringed, watching last year’s production of Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery,” to see the middle-aged Ellen (Joan Allen) blow her top when her mother, Gladys (the glorious Elaine May), asked, yet again, if the dog had been fed, but it was impossible to feel superior in the face of her exhaustion and sorrow. From the inside, Zeller’s unstable, flickering play suggests, losing your mind may not be the worst that you can suffer. It’s the effort to hold on to it that will bleed you dry.
This is familiar territory for Zeller, whose play “The Father,” mounted on Broadway in 2016, featured Frank Langella as André, an egotistical man in the grips of dementia. (Like Lonergan, Zeller was inspired by his grandmother’s struggle with the disease.) As this iteration of André, Pryce is magnificent, funny, and ferocious in his flashes of sanity, devastating in his anger and weakness. Atkins’s Madeleine—dry, crisp, and remote—is more of a cypher, the consummate great man’s wife. (Kent has her mark her domestic authority by speaking in the quiet, calm voice of a person used to being heeded, and you may find yourself craning forward to hear her.) Together, the pair form a portrait of codependency in the extreme; their daughters are hardly more than disappointed, disappointing interlopers in this closed union. Time and again, Madeleine points out that André could never survive without her to cook for him and run his life. More painfully, André begs Madeleine to promise that she won’t die before him, which raises the morbid question of whether, overburdened by her husband’s slippage, she decided to do just that—especially once a mysterious, vampish younger woman (Lucy Cohu), who may or may not be a long-ago lover of André’s, arrives on the scene.
These people—the devoted, resigned wife, the sultry old flame—are types, which is not in itself a problem; types are what people often are. (The same is true of the children; ambitious Anne, we learn, wanted to be a writer but, intimidated by her father’s example, “did nothing.” You can’t blame her.) But so is the life style that they inhabit. From the books that line the living-room walls, the hanging planter, and the out-of-date stove in Anthony Ward’s scenic design, we know that the family is bourgeois but not stuffy, well off but not extravagant, and, since nothing is said about the nature of André’s work, he could be any kind of writer—a French one, you must remind yourself. (Christopher Hampton’s translation is perfectly fluid, but it feels silly to make these two great veterans of the English stage speak of “Saint-Pierre” and a “Madame Armanet”—emphasis on the first syllable, Brit style—when the action could be transposed anywhere.) Universality and generality are cousins, not twins. As wrenching as “The Height of the Storm” frequently is, Zeller has a tendency to slide toward the latter, striking a note of chic, existential despair. “They say life is short, but it isn’t true. It’s terribly long,” Madeleine says. “But, when it does end, it can only be a deliverance.” Maybe so, but Zeller is just forty. He has time to change his mind. ♦
