Memory Play

Florian Zeller’s latest look at the losses of dementia.

- Alexandra Schwartz

The theatre is a paradoxical place to go in search of empathy. While the actors are up there, working to make us feel, through their acute particularity, what it is to be human, we are down here, elbow to elbow with fidgeting, gum-chewing, symphonically coughing specimens of our own kind. The divide can seem vast—one ringing phone can be enough to make you want to cancel everybody, everywhere—and theatre-makers try to bridge it in all sorts of ways. They deconstruct the stage and break the famous fourth wall, enlisting audience members to participate in the action, to varying degrees of success. (I’m thinking of the radically confrontational ending of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s recent “Fairview”—and also, with pity, of the outraged theatregoer, I saw complaining to an usher at Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy,” after one of that production’s numerous displays of simulated swimming-pool coitus left her soaked.) Or they may simply let the story lead, and trust in the power of performance to guide us.

Jonathan Kent’s restrained staging of “The Height of the Storm,” by the French playwright Florian Zeller (a Manhattan Theatre Club production that has arrived at the Samuel J. Friedman after a heralded run in London), is as traditional as they come. The action is set in a grand, slightly shabby home in a suburb of Paris; the house lights are kept down, the audience members stowed safely in their seats, asked only to watch and listen. It is the play itself that lurches and rocks us, addling our expectation of narrative coherence in order to take us inside the sort of experience that can’t be grasped with the mind alone.