Sophocles is having a moment. Robert Ickes’ Oedipus, recently on Broadway, recast the title character as an Obama-like political upstart facing down birtherism allegations, while Lee Zeldin’s The Other Place (which played at The Shed this winter) reimagined Antigone as a dysfunctional family drama with an undercurrent of incest. Now Anna Ziegler takes her crack at the latter tragedy, with a wordy new title that suggests a spikey engagement with a millennia-old story: Antigone (This Play I Read in High School).
In a playwright’s note in the Playbill, Ziegler explains that she had shared an early draft of her adaptation with a friend who asked a key question — Where do you see yourself in the play? — that prompted her to start over from scratch. It was a wise note. The new play brilliantly operates within the structure of Sophocles’ original, with most of its characters and their flaws intact, but reconceives the central conflict for a 21st-century audience.
Instead of advocating the right to bury her traitorous brother Polynices over the objections of her uncle, the newly coronated Theban king Creon (Tony Shalhoub), Antigone (Susannah Perkins) here bucks against the insecure Creon’s new law-and-order mandates against abortion. It’s a procedure that our young heroine seeks out when unexpectedly getting pregnant by her childhood pal and fiancé, Haemon (Calvin Leon Smith), who also happens to be Creon’s son.
Ziegler also inserts herself in the ancient Greek drama in more literal way, creating a one-woman “chorus” who serves as an avatar for a contemporary woman who’s grappled with Antigone‘s relevance since high school. This character, played by Celia Keenan-Bolger with the watchful calmness of a mother who’s trying desperately not morph into a helicopter parent, bridges the past and the present by pinpointing how a modern audience (especially a female one) might identify with a bygone character willing to die for a principle that now seems esoteric.
Burial rituals, like abortion rights, fundamentally center on bodily autonomy — which gives real heft to the question of who has the right (or at least the authority) to overrule any individual’s choice on the matter. The conflict builds in a second-act showdown between Creon and his niece where both sides concede the validity of the other’s argument while still feeling unable to give ground. Creon not only fears being branded a hypocrite for allowing a relative to defy his very public orders, after all, but senses a very real threat that public outcry might topple his reign, and perhaps Thebes itself. Shalhoub projects the groundedness of a ruler who’s willing to be bent, but only so far. Meanwhile, Perkins captures the essence of a manic pixie dream girl with a rebel’s heart, one who gradually begins to trust the inner voice that’s pushing her to stridently stand her ground.
Director Tyne Rafaeli brings a steadiness to a play that straddles the past and present, where philosophical arguments can morph into language that flutters with a kind of rhapsodic poetry. When Haemon recalls how Antigone goaded him to join her on a playground slide when they were kids, he recalls how her legs wrapped around his “like the entangled roots of two neighboring trees.” But the production also has an earthiness, a recognition of the blood spilled in monthly cycles and in birth, that shines through in Antigone’s encounters with an underground abortionist (Katie Kreisler, who doubles as a palace guard).
Ziegler’s Antigone isn’t the same play you read in high school. It’s a far more urgent work that resurfaces one of Western literature’s first female rebels, and gives her a new and vital sense of purpose. ★★★★☆
ANTIGONE (THIS PLAY I READ IN HIGH SCHOOL)
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 5 for $89 to $109
Culture Sauce 