The Father: seeing through fracturing eyes
13 Feb 2019

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Kristina Ruddick

Getting an audience to view the world through another's perspective is a rare theatrical experience. The Father doesn't just offer an empathetic connection to the father's experience, it very cleverly slides the audience into his fractured world. One doesn't just see what is happening, one also feels it through his eyes, his shattering psyche. It is very disturbing and difficult, and very powerful.

The father Andre, is rapidly succumbing to dementia or Alzheimer's. Because the audience is privy to his mind processes and misfires, the plot is non-linear in a very linear fashion. To explain would be a spoiler, but playwright Florian Zeller avoids any documentary dryness by setting the play mostly in the father's reality. As that reality is so foreign, the audience is left to grapple with the disorientation. There were several moments where I sincerely doubted what I was seeing, was the father being gaslighted? Is the audience?

Holding the centre that will not hold is Eric Peterson as Andre. The role earned Frank Langella a Tony and it could easily be showy and attention-grabbing. Andre is emotionally raw and whipsaws from fragile to furious, from paranoid to pleading. As the other characters remark, he is also charming with a child's faith in his own appeal, and Peterson has those characteristics firmly in his grasp. His hair wild and his eyes twinkling, he confides, cajoles and tap dances - even performing utterly inept magical tricks - and is irresistible. Until the terror he is covering up surfaces and he becomes bitter and lashes out.

Peterson embodies the central dilemma facing all the other characters, they, we, want to hold and comfort him but they, we, also desperately want to make him stop being difficult. We know he is manipulating, but we see that he is struggling from a place of fear. It makes for a very nuanced performance, shtick covering confusion. Peterson also avoids making direct appeals to the audience (except on a few occasions when he can't resist) and focuses his offensive on his fellow thespians. And their job, aside from not letting him strut away with centrestage, is a tricky one.

At no point can the audience ever be sure whether the character is real or if they are being seen through Andre's eyes. His daughter and main caregiver Anne, could be Trish Fagan or could be Michelle Monteith. She could be married to Paul Fauteux or she could be living with Beau Dixon (Harlem Duet, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Hamlet). Oyin Oladejo might be the nurse who can handle Andre, or it may be Monteith, who can't. It should be confusing, it is confusing as dementia must be, but the actors have firm grips on an internal reality of their own that they project in a simple, naturalistic style.

The Coal Mine Theatre is an unforgivingly intimate space. When Dixon morphs from sexy amiable to casually terrifying, when Peterson lets us see the despair behind a sight gag, when Fagan's veneer cracks, when Fauteux's resigned exasperation explodes in violence, there is no room for emotional error. Director Ted Dykstra (Rumours) helped forge an ensemble but also maps the dynamics, even the scene changes are a subtle metaphor that is heartbreaking. As I set out into a raging ice storm after The Father, I got turned around entering the subway and suddenly was unsure of which direction was east and which was west. A small confusion but re-framed by Andre's obsession with his frequently errant watch and thus time, The Father crept under my skin and added a shiver beyond the cold of the weather. I had just been briefly in his skin.