Symmetry matters with Zeller because little else does; empathy and catharsis, those old theatrical colors, are not in his paint box. Paradox and cleverness attempt to fill their places, along with a surface playability that is catnip to stars.
That’s how Frank Langella won the Tony Award for “The Father,” raging spectacularly as a man in the throes of dementia — except that, by various sleights of hand, the playwright made it seem as if we in the audience were demented instead.
In “The Mother,” Isabelle Huppert likewise mopped up the stage as a woman involved in an incestuous romance with her 25-year-old son, though perhaps she, too, was merely demented. What Zeller writes aren’t so much plays as abstract poems of glamorous uncertainty, which is not a compliment.
With “The Height of the Storm,” which opened Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, his idée fixe about unfixed consciousness gets its fullest and least rewarding workout. The chic but clammy Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by Jonathan Kent, features the formidable Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins as husband and wife, either or both of whom may be senile or dead.
There’s no use trying to decide; Zeller isn’t interested in meaning but rather its opposite: the decay of meaning with age or perhaps even without it. In his plays, naturalism is a red herring, designed to sucker you. When Pryce’s character says, “People who try to understand things are morons,” you can hear the playwright speaking through him.
Pryce is well cast as André, one of those roaring, selfish literary lions familiar from literary novels and their movie adaptations. (He recently nailed a much more compelling version of the type in “The Wife.”) Atkins plays Madeleine, the saltshaker in their 50-year matched-set marriage: sharply practical, pointedly self-abnegating and clearly the brains of the operation. Together the couple live in a gorgeous old pile in the Paris suburbs, peeling local mushrooms (her) and keeping distant secrets (him) while aging more or less gracefully in place.
Or are they? As the action, such as it is, begins, signals indicate that someone has died. Flowers arrive and so does daughter Anne, nodding sympathetically and reading André’s journals with an eye toward posthumous publication.
But why then is André himself staring mournfully out the window at the aftermath of the thunderstorm that gives the play its English title? (Christopher Hampton did the suave translation.) Does it help to note that in French the play was called “Avant de s’envoler” — which roughly means “before flying away” — and that both titles are drawn from a René Char poem about a reassuring bird?
I thought not.
In any case, just when you are forced to conclude that it must be Madeleine, not André, who died, she too shows up, with the day’s groceries and gossip from the market. Adding to the deliberate confusion, another daughter, Élise, appears, with a boyfriend of no consequence in tow. Anne (Amanda Drew) and Élise (Lisa O’Hare) squabble over who was loved best by which parent, but the evidence suggests they are fighting over scraps.
The improper rationing of parental affection is a given in Zeller’s plays, which also seem to favor old men named André and annoying characters named Anne. (Aside from the current Anne, there’s one in “The Mother,” “The Father” and also “The Son,” which opened in London in February.) It is probably unprofitable to read any meaning into these echoes; their randomness, reshuffled, seems to be the point. We can never know anyone, even if we know their names all too well.
Filled with such thin insights, the play, though brief, is not as brief as one’s interest in it. Just as in “The Father” and “The Mother,” it palls the moment you fill in the outlines of the puzzle and palls even further when you see that the middle has been booby-trapped to remain unsolvable. (Zeller keeps changing the rules.) By the end, it’s not so much that you don’t know who died as that you don’t care.
Or you wouldn’t care if not for Pryce and Atkins, who face the adversity of the text in contrastingly and compulsively watchable ways. Pryce pours himself into every cranny of his character’s contradictions: sometimes snappish, sometimes pathetic, always transparent. He even trembles gorgeously — not just his right hand but his face and at times his whole body.
Atkins doesn’t shake. She’s not transparent, either; like most humans, she’s effortlessly opaque. Since Madeleine is too — she’s one of those mothers whose idea of comfort does not involve much comforting — it’s a perfect match. It would be hard to say who is less indulgent: the actor swatting away emotion or the mother whose daughters might as well be the mushrooms she peels so perfectly.
Only when a stranger enters with information that would rock her assumptions if they proved to be true does Atkins let a faint tremor cross her brow. In context, it comes across as an earthquake. She suggests in a moment that beneath the text, or perhaps off to the side in a room whose door is locked, there exists a large feeling: the dread that comes flooding in when life’s false promise of security is breached.
The rest of the cast, all but one of them imported from last fall’s London production, do perfectly well as spotters for the stars’ maneuvers. And you have to admit that a playwright could do worse than creating a juicy acting exercise for treasurable actors in their 70s (Pryce) and 80s (Atkins). Does it matter so much that for all their skill — set off by Kent’s exquisitely decorous Broadway staging — there’s no there there?
It does. Even if you accept that “The Height of the Storm” (as I wrote about “The Father”) is more of a vehicle than a destination, you may eventually grow weary of being taken for a ride.
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Production Notes:
‘The Height of the Storm’
Through Nov. 10 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, manhattantheatreclub.com. 1 hour 20 minutes.
By Florian Zeller; translated by Christopher Hampton; directed by Jonathan Kent; sets and costumes by Anthony Ward; lighting by Hugh Vanstone; sound by Paul Groothuis; music by Gary Yershon; production stage manager, James FitzSimmons; general manger, Florie Seery. Presented by Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director, Barry Grove, executive producer, and Simon Friend, Mark Goucher, Howard Panter and Scott Landis.
Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Eileen Atkins, Amanda Drew, Lisa O’Hare, Lucy Cohu and James Hillier.
This article originally appeared in
.