The Father

Richard Nelson’s critically lauded adaptation of Strindberg’s classic, in which a power struggle between husband and wife leads to devastating consequences. THE FATHER still has the power to astonish. Richard Nelson’s new adaptation of the Swedish text speaks in clean, spare English prose, the kind that remains discreetly outside time without betraying the conventions of the period when the play was written (1887) … It’s not exactly news to report that THE FATHER is an extraordinary play. The news is that its ability to shock remains undiminished as, in the course of twenty-four hours, the increasingly chilly, twenty-year marriage of the Captain and the willful Laura escalates into a war to the death. We are deep in territory that Ingmar Bergman would later explore, though never with quite such harrowing results … Mr Nelson’s [is an] excellent adaptation. -Vincent Canby, The New York Times