Theatre in Review: Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)/(Public Theater)

	Celia Keenan-Bolger, Susannah Perkins. Photo: Joan Marcus

There's no doubt about it: Antigone is this season's It Girl. We've already had The Other Place, which resets Sophocles' tragedy in a contemporary renovated British kitchen. (Antigone, and Creon, her uncle and antagonist, are named Annie and Chris, but the resemblance is unmistakable.) Coming up in a couple of weeks is Antigone in Analysis; I hope we don't find out that she suffers from an Oedipus complex. And today's topic is Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), which takes place in a then-and-now version of Thebes and wrestles with an urgent political issue.

One can only marvel at the strange process by which multiple playwrights seize on similar ideas at the same time. I've lost count of the feminist deconstructions of Jane Austen that have come our way recently. And the last couple of seasons have featured at least three plays dunking on Arthur Miller's The Crucible, defending the play's villain, Abigail Williams, as a victim of its hero, John Proctor, reframed as a sexual predator. Sex is the issue in the two Antigones we've seen so far. In The Other Place, she has been molested by her uncle, sending her on a binge of self-destructive behavior. In the current attraction at the Public, Sophocles' original sticking point, the burial of Antigone's brother, Polyneices, has been dispensed with altogether; now the issue is Antigone's decision to have an illegal abortion.

Fair enough: If you're going to update Antigone, as is playwright Anna Ziegler's intention, you might as well pick an issue that still drives people crazy after all these years. You can say she is colonizing Sophocles for purposes of her own. In the prologue, Ziegler has a teenager complain about the original text, "I'm just like, is it even about her? It seems like it's all about her brother's body. A man's body." This causes Celia Keenan-Bolger, who functions as an updated Greek chorus, to imagine a mother telling her child, "I'm going to tell you a different story, about Antigone's body and also your own."

But, as The Other Place also demonstrated, no matter how dire things appear in the current moment, they don't easily fit into the pitiless world of Sophoclean tragedy. It doesn't help that the world of Ziegler's play is insufficiently imagined: Following the deaths of Oedipus and Jocasta, Thebes is in upheaval. The bookish, retiring Creon, unhappy about gaining the reins of power, has promised to restore order by strictly enforcing laws already on the books. But Antigone, who, scarred by her parents' spectacular flameout, is on a tear -- running around dive bars, having it off in bathrooms with waiters -- and is pregnant by Haemon, Creon's son, to whom she is reluctantly affianced. Trying to figure out her future, and pretty certain it doesn't include parenthood, she visits a back-alley abortion mill, setting in motion events that will result in many deaths.

The events of Oedipus Rex cast an uncomfortable shadow over Ziegler's play. "I mean, my parents loved each other, and look what happened there," Antigone notes, in one of several remarks that got nervous laughter at the performance I attended. Ziegler also struggles to make the situation, as defined by Sophocles, work for her. Both Haemon, a closet case, even to himself, and Ismene, Antigone's sister, feel oddly irrelevant. Creon is such a reluctant, compromise-minded dictator that he makes a shaky opponent. ("I think I'd like to say something about nation states," he says, woodenly, in another speech that got an unwanted laugh.) Also, the nature of Antigone's transgression is very different here: In burying her brother, Sophocles' heroine commits a brazenly public rebuke of Creon, one that threatens his authority. Ziegler's protagonist acts privately, then gets outed in the city's gossip rags. (Thebes, for all its modern accoutrements, still believes in print media.) Certainly, her actions might cause a scandal; it's harder to see why it drives the populace to storm the palace.

Almost as if fearing the implications of Antigone's story, Ziegler indulges in too-cute strategies. Tossing a copy of Death of a Salesman, she says, "I think plays that end with death are attempting a sort of performative reversal wherein we see the actor on the stage as real and we, the audience, as separate from him, so if he dies it means therefore we will not and of course that's bullshit." Well, you ought to know. When Creon dispatches a prisoner to a cell with no Wi-Fi, the poor soul reacts as if being sent to the rack. Then there's the trio of guards who dog Creon, who often move about the stage in unison. "Am I supposed to...tip you?" Creon wonders.

Acting as an obbligato to the main plot is the narrative of the chorus, who editorializes about the characters at length and recalls life with her unhappy, often cruel mother: "All I knew was that when she turned on me -- 'Dicey, you're not seriously telling me this bedroom is clean' or 'a picture of a person -- where the hell are the ears?' or 'a girl someone would want to be friends with, smelling like that?" --whatever she said -- I believed it. I internalized it."

The Chorus also recalls her problematic pregnancy: "I wasn't looking for this. I didn't want it. And there's no father, or no one I'd choose to be someone's father -- and yet...this is a sign, right? A literal plus sign that seems to signal that someone out there, or up there, or in the stars, wants this for me, this addition to my life, that maybe I'm supposed to have a child, this child, even though I also know I just...can't."

These sequences add little to the play's drama, but they underscore it as part of a trend, including such recent offerings as Meat Suit and The Waterfall, which openly express ambivalence, even revulsion, over the idea of motherhood. Indeed, pregnancy is seen only for its ability to destroy one's autonomy and irrevocably alter one's body. It is, basically, a source of dread. Whatever one feels about Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), that's something to think about.

Still, Tyne Rafaeli's production fails to generate much tension, even in Antigone's climactic face-off with Creon. It includes a sequence that should be electrifying, in which Antigone slowly strips herself bare, noting various bodily details, by way of making clear to Creon just who he is condemning to death; surprisingly, it doesn't pay off. Susannah Perkins has a solid grasp of Antigone's contradictions, even if one wishes she had a speech or two exploring more deeply how she feels about her tainted family legacy. Tony Shalhoub isn't entirely convincing in his handling of Creon's arguments. "You're not wrong, but it doesn't matter," he tells Antigone, "Because also I'm not wrong. And there is our tragedy: two truths, writhing on their slab of stone." Really? I doubt that Ziegler believes that. Keenan-Bolger, who doesn't really have a character to play, is unusually stiff. Calvin Leon Smith and Haley Wong are solid as the underwritten Haemon and Ismene. But Katie Kreisler makes a scalding impression as the clinic proprietor, who demands cold, hard cash, even from royalty.

David Zinn's minimal set helps the production's pace, with Jen Schriever's lighting using the overhead color-changing units to change the emotional tone as needed. Enver Chakartash's costumes are solid. Daniel Kluger's sound design includes a preshow playlist that features Joshua Redman's jazzy take on "The Times They Are a-Changin'," and, in the play itself, such effects as airplane engines, rock music, and rioting crowds.

Ziegler is often a graceful writer -- summing up Creon's morality program, Antigone says, "He thinks he can cinch the city like a corset. That keeping people's pants on will keep everything else inside too, but it won't" -- but she doesn't have the stomach for real tragedy. Unlike Robert Icke's recent adaptation of Oedipus Rex, she hasn't fully translated Thebes to the modern day, creating a world that we can believe in. As it happens, Antigone is a play I saw in high school, a television production of Jean Anouilh's version, set in occupied France. The confrontation between Genevieve Bujold's Antigone and Fritz Weaver's Creon was riveting, even if the issue was her brother's burial; Bujold created a young woman who shakes a society to its knees by speaking truth to power. I have never forgotten it; I fear Ziegler's version may not have the same lasting effect. --David Barbour