The Father - Softcover

Richard Nelson's critically lauded adaptation of Strindberg's classic, in which a power struggle between husband and wife leads to devastating consequences. "THE FATHER still has the power to astonish. Richard Nelson's new adaptation of the Swedish text speaks in clean, spare English prose, the kind that remains discreetly outside time without betraying the conventions of the period when the play was written (1887) ... It's not exactly news to report that THE FATHER is an extraordinary play. The news is that its ability to shock remains undiminished as, in the course of twenty-four hours, the increasingly chilly, twenty-year marriage of the Captain and the willful Laura escalates into a war to the death. We are deep in territory that Ingmar Bergman would later explore, though never with quite such harrowing results ... Mr Nelson's [is an] excellent adaptation." -Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Richard Nelson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Perkins School of Theology. He has been the W. J. A. Power Professor of Biblical Hebrew and Old Testament since 2001. Previously he served as pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh (1974-77), then taught at Ferrum College in Virginia (1977-81) and Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary in Pennsylvania (1981-2001). He is the author of seven books and numerous articles on Biblical themes. Professor Nelson is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America He is a noted scholar who has published commentaries on Kings, Deuteronomy, and Joshua.