Reframing ANTIGONE For Today — Review

The warning signs came early. I got a bad feeling early in Antigone (That Play I Read In High School) when our contemporary narrator, the play’s one-woman “Chorus,” concluded her quick-here’s-the-backstory recap of Oedipus’ tragic fall—slept with mother, murdered father—with a quippy: “So…that wasn’t great.”

Yikes! All the same, I did my best to stick with playwright Anna Ziegler’s remarkably inept new work, a temporally displaced feminist riff on Sophocles’ Antigone now at The Public Theater through April 5. But despite some intriguing structural choices and a few strong performances, Ziegler’s play quickly grows mired in tonal confusion and a frustratingly thin takeaway.  

In this Antigone, our guiding Chorus has a single voice: the soothing tones of two time Tony Award-winner Celia Keenan-Bolger, a welcome presence. She speaks of discovering Antigone’s tale of defiance in high school, and recalls its profound impact on her. Now an adult, she is unexpectedly pregnant, and faces a decision similarly complicated by the shifting whims of powerful men.

Alongside and around the Chorus’ fragmented narration, a reframed version of Antigone’s story plays out. In this telling, the events are dislodged from a clear time, classical and modern mushing together. And rather than seeking burial for her brother, the dilemma for Antigone (Susannah Perkins) is also a pregnancy, and the question of who decides her own body’s future. 

At its core, this reframing works, attacking the original play’s questions around bodies and familial duty from a new angle. But Ziegler’s text baldly underlines the point, while never providing her characters a dimensionality that might allow us to invest emotionally. 

Tonally speaking, the adaptation feels muddled. Dramatic confrontations are undercut by constant, abrupt shifts into juvenile humor. Most arrive in the form of the awkward King Creon (Tony Shalhoub, doing Moss Hart-as-despot) and buffoonish retinue (the trio of Ethan Dubin, Katie Kreisler & Dave Quay). The tonal whiplash is evidently deliberate, but I confess bafflement at the goal. True, many Greek tragedies are surprisingly (if darkly) funny—but not self-mocking, as this Antigone often feels. 

Nothing is clarified in Tyne Rafaeli’s frequently clumsy direction. Overly conspicuous blocking distracts in many scenes—circling, always these actors are circling!—and leaves tender moments feeling artificial, or forced. Rafaeli leans into the script’s tonal dissonance, and her actors struggle to make sense of the contradictions. 

Antigone herself is a mess, here. At first, deliberately so: Perkins has a lot of fun playing the grieving, horribly depressed Antigone’s descent into debauchery, particularly in an early scene where she throws herself at a hipster bartender named Achilles (no, he sighs, not that Achilles). Later returning to the palace, Antigone spars enjoyably with her betrothed (and also cousin), Haemon, played with moving open-heartedness by the always excellent Calvin Leon Smith. Perkins is enjoyably prickly both here and with her sister, Ismene, though Haley Wong never quite communicates Ismene’s intense attachment to her sister that will later be crucial. 

Yet Antigone’s motivations grow messy as the play proceeds. Her naivety at the consequences of a back-alley abortion betray the character’s intelligence up to this point. Would Antigone really be so shocked at Creon’s willingness to discard her? Would she waste her breath attempting to reason with him, in an extended debate that hashes out obvious points vis-à-vis morality and politics? When Antigone finally strips before Creon and guides him through each part of her body, entreating him to recognize her humanity, the words are too evidently aimed at us—us the audience, us the world of today. Yet Ziegler has not motivated any of it within the action of this story.  

Equally frustrating is the play’s conclusion, which circles back to the Chorus’ identification with Antigone without deepening it. “Antigone inspired me” is a fine starting point, but feels thin as a dramatic conclusion, and the closing attempts at profundity ultimately fall flat. 

Perkins and Keenan-Bolger are nonetheless excellent throughout, bringing heartbreaking warmth and aching humanity to a play that never finds enough depth to equal their powerful work. 

‍Antigone (That Play I Read In High School) is now in performance at The Public Theatre. For tickets and more information, visit here.