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.