Isabelle Huppert and Chris Noth: Madness, Marriage, and Mystery in ‘The Mother’
The French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller has written a sequence of three plays focused on family and fragility: first, The Mother (La Mère), then The Father (Le Père; performed on Broadway in 2016, starring Frank Langella), and most recently The Son (Le Fils). Some names of characters recur in these productions, but the plays are conceptually rather than formally related.
However, in the script and Playbill for The Mother, which opens tonight off- Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company (to April 13) starring Isabelle Huppert and Chris Noth (and who would ever have them put them together as a stage coupling until now?), the characters are listed as The Mother (Huppert), The Father (Noth), The Son (Justice Smith), and The Girl (Odessa Young).
Not pinning proper names on to the characters turns them into archetypes and perhaps more pliable fictional forms for what Zeller himself calls “a black farce.”