Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Isabelle Huppert was devastating and compulsively watchable in Florian Zeller’s THE MOTHER

• By drediman
• April 15, 2019
• No Comments

Isabelle Huppert in Atlantic Theater Company’s production of “The Mother” by Florian Zeller at the Linda Gross Theater. Photo by Ahron R. Foster.

This weekend at the Linda Gross Theater, I caught the final Off-Broadway performance of Florian Zeller’s The Mother, which enjoyed a sold out run courtesy of Atlantic Theater Company. Although not directly related to Mr. Zeller’s The Father – which played Broadway a few seasons ago (and for which the great Frank Langella won a Tony Award) –  The Mother broadly follows the same downward trajectory. The play tells the story of Anne, a woman whose life seems to have served its purpose. Her children have lives of their own, and her husband seems to have moved on as well. Left to her own devices, she descends down into the rabbit hole of self-destructive, pill-popping madness.

I have mixed feelings about the play, which on paper has the vague air of all having been done before. The English translation by Christopher Hampton begins dutifully, its skillful navigation of the play’s blurry terrain between delusional hallucination and glimpses of reality only evident as the compact play unfolds. Additionally, director Trip Cullman’s trippy (I couldn’t resist the pun!), slickly-designed production is thankfully brash and uncompromising in its relentlessness, giving the audience a first person taste of Anne’s increasingly untethered perspective of the world around her.

As for the cast, there is no doubt that The Mother was written to be a vehicle for the actress playing Anne. In the role, French star Isabelle Huppert has given us one of the most visceral, emotionally and physically fearless performances of the season. Initially, I was concerned that her artful French mode of acting would diffuse instead of enhance Anne’s gut-wrenching obliteration (I felt this way about her performance opposite Cate Blanchett in a revival of Genet’s The Maids a few season back). I needn’t have worried. Her Anne so convincingly disintegrates before your very eyes, and its both devastating and compulsively watchable. Ms. Huppert was given more than solid support by Chris Noth as her slippery husband and Justice Smith as her beloved son. As the various, invariably younger “other women” in the play, Odessa Young was also excellent.

RECOMMENDED

THE MOTHER
Off-Broadway, Play
Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Closed