The Father

By far Strindberg's most aggressive work, The Father is a feverish nightmare of the struggle he saw between defiant masculinity and the "treacherous weakness" of woman. No matter how paranoid he may seem on the surface, Strindberg manages to anticipate most of the issues arousing women today, particularly the idea that marriage is motivated by politics as much as by romance. The prize in the war between the Captain and Laura is their daughter Bertha, and what must be resolved is which of her parents will determine her future.

Despite its domestic setting, The Father is a large-scale heroic drama, with two mighty opponents. "There are large forces at work here, which rattle the walls of the bourgeois drawing room, " Robert Brustein writes in his introduction. "And the unconscious strains of paranoia, hallucination, even dementia, associated with Expressionist drama, are never too far from the surface."

Mr. Brustein's adaptation takes account of modern feminist sensibilities without diminishing The Father's relentless power and furious conclusion.

Author: August Strindberg
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Published: 05/19/1992
Pages: 77
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.33lbs
Size: 8.46h x 5.72w x 0.32d
ISBN: 9780929587868

About the Author
The Plays for Performance series is edited by Nicholas Rudall, former artistic director of the Court Theatre at the University of Chicago where he is professor of classics, and Bernard Sahlins, founder and director of the Second City. They both live in Chicago, Illinois.