Manatee Players starts studio theater season with ‘The Father’

One of the most acclaimed plays of 2016 in New York was “The Father,” a harrowing drama about an aging man, played by Frank Langella, who is in the early stages of dementia. It had a limited Broadway run after successful productions in Paris and London, and it turned previously obscure French playwright Florian Zeller into one of the hottest properties in theater.

On the basis of that one play, which won the prestigious Moliere Award in France and a Tony Award for Langella here, the New York Times hailed Zeller as “the next playwright to know.”

Bradenton audiences get their first chance to see “The Father,” which Zeller calls “a tragic farce,” beginning this week when it opens the 2017-18 Bradenton Kiwanis Theater season at the Manatee Performing Arts Center.

The titular character is Andre, a domineering 80-year-old man. Andre apparently was once a tap dancer, but it’s possible that he was an engineer. He lives with his daughter Anne and her husband Antoine, but perhaps Anne lives in London with her new lover Pierre.

Andre is a sharp and domineering man, but he wonders whether he is starting to lose control.

Candace Artim is directing the Manatee Players production.

“I had heard a little about it, not a lot, when I saw it on the Manatee Players’ docket,” she said. “I did a little research and I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, that would be a cool one to be a part of.’ I was just struck by the content of dementia and by the relationship between the father and the daughter.”

The father seems to have been a domineering and not especially likeable man before his dementia started to affect him. He’s been especially cruel to his daughter Anne, and she’s the one who ends up being a constant presence in his life and tending to him as his disease progresses.

What impressed Artim most about the script, she said, was the way Zeller takes the audience into the mind of a man with dementia.

“It’s told from the father’s point of view,” she said. “We don’t really know what the time is. We don’t even know who is who from time to time. We get the feeling of being inside the confusion.”

The Manatee Players production features company regular Alex Topp as Andre and Amity Hoffman as Anne. Bradley Keville, Kelsey Azadian, David Nields and Kristin Mazzitelli round out the cast.

A few seasons ago, the Manatee Performing Arts Center began a program called Action Through Acting, which pairs each production in the Bradenton Kiwanis Theater with an appropriate local non-profit. In the case of “The Father,” the non-profit is the Roskamp Institute, the Sarasota facility that specializes in research into treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Details: Aug. 24-Sept. 10, Kiwanis Theater at the Manatee Performing Arts Center, 502 Third Ave. W., Bradenton. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. $26. 941-748-5875, manateeperformingartscenter.com.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Manatee Players starts studio theater season with ‘The Father’."