From Antigone (this play I read in high school), at the Public.
Photo: Joan Marcus
Ours is a moment for the Greeks. The virulence of our self-inflicted plagues, the scale of our rage, our complicity, our impotence; the ongoing howl against whatever new and monumental crime has been committed overnight — the tragic playwrights of ancient Athens wrote to a commensurate scope. In their bloody poetry, the human animal expands, often to terrifying capacity. From our millennia-later perspective, it’s also remarkable that a culture that didn’t count women as citizens — or even, truly, as full people; Aeschylus’s Oresteia turns on the divine judgment that a mother isn’t really a parent to her child but simply a vessel for the male’s seed — created such staggering expressions of female wrath and righteousness on its stages. (On the infinite list of reasons why art matters, this paradox ranks pretty high.) Perhaps that too is why the Greeks keep coming back around. The whole women are people thing: We still don’t have consensus there, do we?
Given such a bleak view out our own windows, it’s bracing to see a playwright like Anna Ziegler take on one of the old tragedies with the most staying power. In Ziegler’s shudderingly intense Antigone (this play I read in high school), directed with assertive spareness by Tyne Rafaeli, a diffident present-day narrator named Dicey (Celia Keenan-Bolger) starts things off by admitting that she’s felt unable to shake the heroine of Sophocles’s play ever since tenth-grade English. “It was … confusing,” says Dicey, her forehead knitted up with trouble. “I mean, here was this girl who says whatever she wants, whenever she wants, even on pain of death, while I couldn’t raise my hand to ask to go to the bathroom.” Antigone, Dicey explains to us, keeps finding her — keeps shaming her with her audacity. In a college course, “on a bad date in a cramped theater,” finally in the hands of a teenager reading the play across from her on a plane, the stubborn Greek princess shows up again and again. She won’t go away. “An-tig-o-ne,” says a character to this same princess, sounding out her name, after Sophocles’s characters start to appear onstage. “An-tig-o-ne. Anti-gone. Against going. Not gone.”
This character can be forgiven for jumbling Greek and English — “Antigone” really means something akin to “against birth,” “against offspring,” or even “against semen.” And that’s just as relevant to Ziegler’s project as the idea that this character refuses to disappear. Antigone (this play I read in high school) is, at the very least, two plays (many more if you consider all the echoing Antigones down the ages): On the outside, it’s the story of Dicey, a woman from right now, who, along with feeling pursued by an ancient character, has realized that she’s pregnant and — having been raised by an angry, suffering mother whom she always feared didn’t want her — doesn’t know whether she should have the baby. On the inside, it’s still the story of that character and her fateful struggle against the state, but it’s been refracted through Dicey’s era, her vocabulary, her own dawning revelations. When Dicey meets that teenager on the plane, a door bursts open in her mind: “I’m just like, is it even about her?” says the kid with a shrug. “It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.” (Kids these days — casually forcing us to reevaluate our literary heritage!) In that moment, Dicey’s past and her present collide, hard, with the story she somehow now sees that she’s never understood. And so she starts to tell it — along with her own story — differently.
That kid on the plane is also Antigone herself: same costume, same actor. That’s Susannah Perkins, one of our true beacons of weird New York theater, glinting and crackling here as ever with their ultra-distinctive energy. It’s androgynous and tender and dry, Millennial-Gen Z cusp in a destabilizing way, watchful, nimble, and comically sharp. But Perkins is also taking a big leap with this Antigone: Whereas in the past they’ve stolen scenes and whole plays in roles that are more oddball-coded, a little removed, a little sexless, this Antigone fucks — both the guy she’s engaged to, Haemon (Calvin Leon Smith), and at least one random waiter named Achilles (Ethan Dubin, making very funny work out of this bashful plebe who rushes to explain that he’s “like, not THE Achilles”). More important, she insists on maintaining autonomy in the aftermath of sex. Here, Antigone’s “crime” — so defined by the state, as embodied by her uncle Creon (Tony Shalhoub), the anxious new king — isn’t burying her brother Polynices. It’s much closer to home. She gets an abortion.
What works so well about Ziegler’s play is that this fundamental shift doesn’t function as a relevancy grab. Abortion isn’t a prickly issue picked at random — it is, in fact, a modern analogue for the character’s action that reveals a deeper reading of the Sophocles. It turns out that the old Greek’s play is about Antigone’s body after all: Who cares about Polynices? Antigone is condemned to death because of what she chooses to do, publicly and unapologetically, with her own two hands and everything that’s attached to them. In a fantastic moment between Perkins’s Antigone and Shalhoub’s Creon (sympathetic, fretful, crushed by a conviction that rules are solutions), Ziegler reverses the famous dialectic of the original characters: Sophocles’s Antigone (every high schooler learns to regurgitate on their English test) appeals to the laws of the gods while Creon represents the laws of man. Here, Creon stumbles over his words as he insists that women’s “biology” naturally necessitates social sacrifice, that to change that “you’d have to make your way up to Mount Olympus itself and take that one up with the gods.” “Or,” Perkins launches back like a missile, “write better laws!”
The Greeks were all about agōn — argument — and this Antigone is at its hottest when Ziegler drives into the ancient form and pits two unstoppable forces against each other. The heat becomes searing when Perkins strips down to nothing, piece by piece: “This is my bad ankle…” she says. “This is where a camp counselor spilled coffee on my arm…” (Ziegler writes with a sure-footed blend of contemporary informality and intermittent expansions into the lyric or the epic.) “This is my lower back. Once a man asked me if he could cut me there, just a little, and I said no thank you and he did it anyway … This is my heart … This is my waist … Inside here, that’s my womb.”
Watching Perkins do this very scary, very brave thing, I found myself looking around the theater. It was a matinee — lots of white hair in the crowd. I wondered, “Does anyone in this room believe this person’s body is, in fact, not their own? Did anyone vote for this person’s essential disenfranchisement? What are they experiencing now? How could anyone witness this and not see?”
Of course, it doesn’t work like that. Creon doesn’t see — Shalhoub, trembling with resistance and shame, drops his head behind his crossed arms, refusing even to look. As long as there are oppressive states, structures of power that make false promises of order and peace for some at the expense of the bodies and souls of others, people will keep trying to cover their eyes and block their ears. At least, as Ziegler proves, we can trust Antigone to keep howling.
Antigone (this play I read in high school) is at the Public Theater through April 5.
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