Commanding ‘Father’

August Strindberg’s The Father is a dark, deeply misogynist play. It tells of women’s deceitful, controlling nature that results in a man’s insanity, emasculation and ultimate death. But despite its objectionable bias, the play remains relevant today in its honest, albeit paranoiac, look at the core of sexual relationships.

Under the aegis of American Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Robert Brustein, the talented cast and crew offer a sophisticated insight on this sometimes vulgar Darwinian battle between the sexes. The Captain (Geordie F. Broadwater ’04), is the titular father, a career army man and respected amateur scientist, driven to insanity by his wife Laura (Catherine B. Gowl ’02) as she schemes to obtain control over their daughter Bertha’s education. Laura plant seeds of suspicion in the Captain’s mind about the true paternity of Bertha and about his very ability to reason. This self-doubt festers into violence and madness, and Laura’s triumph in controlling both her daughter and husband’s fate.

The Father is indeed an essay on paranoia that Broadwater interprets brilliantly. In fact, the success of the play comes most forcefully from the outstanding cast, in particular the nuanced portrayals of the Captain and his wife.

To portray Laura simply as a one-dimensional vixen and the Captain as a hapless victim would sink the play into a facile exercise of melodrama. Instead, the two actors find an ideal balance between the multiple facets of their characters and their interactions. Gowl’s Laura is manipulative, but she also shows the vulnerability and intelligence spurring her motives.

Broadwater’s able acting evolves with his progressing madness. Though by the play’s end the audience finds the Captain’s state desperate and terrifying, Broadwater’s transformation is gradual and imminently believable. He has total command over his acting and inhabits the role completely.

The casting of director Jeremy R. Funke ’04 also corresponds uncannily well to the function of each of the characters within the play. Emily S. Knapp ’03 as the Nurse carries an earthy, calming and maternal presence to the set—the only brand of femininity the captain comes to condone. Sarah L. Thomas ’03 reflects a childish, self-effacing manner as Bertha, which mirrors her own objectification by her parents. One exception, however, is the Doctor’s intentional lack of physical presence, a highly caricatured, goofy character privy to the machinations of women, that becomes a one-dimensional foil to the Captain.

Indeed, caricature and one-dimensionality is precisely where the play is vulnerable; the focus on each character’s title—the Doctor, the Captain and the Pastor—highlight the play’s penchant for broad generalization over specification.

Though every cast member offers a carefully considered performance, the technical makeup of the play at times lacks attention to detail to ground the play in concrete terms. The production could have benefited, for example, by a transformation in the lighting that corresponds to the Captain’s condition. The manipulation of light here would have served as a potentially dynamic symbol for a play that transpires entirely by evening or night. Instead the audience feels the light bathe the Captain indiscriminately, in scenes where smoke and paranoia could benefit from subtler tones.

The set, however, nicely benefits from such deliberate treatment. In the first scenes, each prop on the stage is in its proper place, with the rifles and pistols hung on the wall and the coat rack holding the Captain’s tunic. With time and the Captain’s growing madness, the order within the set begins to slacken. By the end of the second act, when the Captain throws a desk lamp at Laura in rage, the room has begun to slip into disarray.

The props also undergo a telling transformation. In one of the final scenes, the Captain, while haranguing against women, flails the now stripped-down coat rack—a mutated phallic symbol—only to have it cajoled away from him. His rifles too, that had established order and power in the his office, are emptied by the Nurse, and thrown to the ground in disgust by the Captain.

The play ends with this brilliant culmination: Broadwater, who has forced the audience throughout to witness his slow descent, writhes on the floor amidst the disordered set, surrounded by the inscrutable and brilliantly complex characters that induced his fatal paranoia.

The audience leaves this production with a feeling of incompleteness; there are no heroes and no answers to the difficult questions posed. But this is perhaps the greatest effect Strindberg’s play can hope to engender. Each character is too intricately rendered, and each struggle too complex to reassure us of our notions about men and women, good and evil. Instead, the audience must confront by curtain’s fall the glaring emptiness and disorder at the heart of human relationships, which the play, in this powerful and nuanced production, pries open for all to see.