OPENS JANUARY 31st
| Alan Sader as Andrew in The Father. |
| Richmond Shakespeare presents Florian Zeller’s The Father: A Tragic Farce opening Friday January 31st, 2025 and running Thursday – Saturday evenings at 7:30p and Sunday afternoons at 2p through February 16th at Virginia Repertory Theatre’s Theatre Gym, 114 W Broad St, Richmond, VA 23220. A special pay-what-you-will preview performance will take place on Thursday January 30th in association with CultureWorks. Post show talkbacks with representatives of the Greater Richmond Alzheimer’s Association will take place on Sunday February 2nd and 9th. The Father is helmed by Richmond Theatre Community Circle (RTCC) award winning director Dr. Jan Powell, former artistic director of Richmond Shakespeare and assistant professor of theatre at Randolph-Macon College. The cast features an all-star group of some of Richmond’s most beloved professional actors including RTCC awards winners Alan Sader, Grey Garrett, Andrew Gall, Melissa Johnston Price, and RTCC award nominees Calie Bain, and John Moon. “This is a beautiful play; it’s truly remarkable because it’s uniquely structured to reach beneath the surface of daily life and articulate the fanciful, vague, fragile state of an unpredictably shifting mind. Florian Zeller, the playwright, was a caregiver for his elderly father, and he has written a moving, beautifully artistic exploration of that experience. This play resonantly weaves strands of memory, identity, imagination, and relationship into an undulating experiential tapestry. In rehearsals, I think we’ve felt a great deepening of our understanding of, and compassion for, living with ‘brain change.'” remarks director Jan Powell. “For me, of course, the opportunity to work with such tremendous talents as we have in this cast, exploring such enormously personal, vulnerable material, is as thrilling and satisfying as anything I’ve ever done. This will be a must-see production for the audience and the people they love and care for.” |
by Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton
January 30 – February 16, 2025
Virginia Repertory Theatre’s Theatre Gym, 114 W Broad St, Richmond, VA 23220
Now 80 years old, Andrew was once a tap dancer. He lives with his daughter, Anne, and her husband, Antoine. Or was Andrew an engineer, whose daughter Anne lives in London with her new lover, Paul? The thing is, he is still wearing his pyjamas, and he can’t find his watch. He is starting to wonder if he’s losing control. Winner of the 2014 Molière award for France’s best play, The Father makes us see things as if through the confused eyes of Andrew, as he struggles to make sense of a progressively befuddling world.
A play that constantly confounds expectations and works almost like a thriller, with a sinister Pinteresque edge…full of guile, particularly in the way it toys with time, yet is also simplicity itself, and is never tricksy. The Father constantly makes you question the truth and the nature of reality…an astonishingly unguarded play about the cruelties of love and the limits of patience, and the way child-parent relationships become inverted as old age creeps up and mugs us.