Review: 'In the Height of the Storm' Is Chilly and Confusing

André is distressed. His wife has died, and their adult daughters want to sell their shambling, book-and-light-filled home outside of Paris. 

Or...maybe his wife is alive, and André is dead. 

Or maybe they're both alive, puttering around the kitchen, laughingly instructing their children on how to cook mushrooms. 

All three of these realities seem to exist at the same time. It's an intellectual puzzle and it becomes the focus of Florian Zeller's insubstantial drama, drowning out the other, more emotional themes of grief, the mysteries of marriage, and the disintegration of the family. Maybe Zeller's point is to cause the audience to experience André's mental dislocation: he's not sure what's true and what is not, and neither are we. There's no solid ground, no cause and effect, just people wandering in and out of the kitchen, talking to whomever is there.  

But this gambit leads to a distance and chilliness that doesn't serve the story, such as it is. This is French playwright Zeller's third production in New York. The first, 2016's "The Father," starred Frank Langella as an elderly man with dementia also named André — but it was deeper and more harrowing. This piece just feels clever-ish.

Nonetheless, the performances by Jonathan Pryce as André and Eileen Atkins as his wife Madeline are majestic. He's literary and garrulous, a storyteller; she's practical and pointed, making her daughters work for every ounce of affection. Each of them is, by turns, vulnerable, commanding and surprisingly funny. Their chemistry together is electric — they've mastered the neat trick of giving the feeling of a long, comfortably broken-in marriage, with communication conveyed as much by glances and posture as by words. When they tell that story about cooking mushrooms, he copies her body language, and it has the cadence of a routine they've pulled out at 100 dinner parties to amuse their guests. 

But their mutual strength and sparkle only serve to underscore the fundamental weakness of Zeller's play: we never get to inhabit the story, to feel their suffering. Whenever that magic starts to happen, another ghost disrupts it by drifting into or out of the kitchen — or are those shadows real, living people? It is impossible to say.

"In the Height of the Storm," by Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton, directed by Jonathan Kent, at the Manhattan Theater Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theater through Nov. 24.