ANTIGONE
It’s a far cry from the cathartic, elevated cadences of Greek tragedy. Writing for the Athenians of 442 BC, Sophocles set up Antigone and Creon as clear-cut representatives of right and wrong thinking. Antigone insists on burying Polynices, a noble youth who died battling his treacherous brother; but Creon decrees that Polynices’ corpse must lie exposed as a warning to would-be rebels. Though Antigone’s defiance brings her to her death, she obeys the laws of god and family–which, Sophocles says, far outweigh the rules of earthly government. (Indeed, her death takes on a holiness that reflects the drama’s roots in ancient ceremonies of human sacrifice, in which a virgin was delivered to the god of the underworld.) And Creon is crushed for flouting divine order: his son Haemon, betrothed to Antigone, in his grief commits suicide, which prompts the suicide of Creon’s wife. Devastated and alone, Creon acknowledges his sin and accepts his punishment.
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Anchoring the production is Dawn Alden as Antigone: her face, with its high cheekbones, long nose, and piercingly vulnerable eyes, could have come straight off an ancient Attic vase painting. It’s often captivating to watch Alden surefootedly negotiate Antigone’s emotional shifts from willful obstinacy to gawky goofiness to shy sexiness to self-punishing guilt to pure terror as (illuminated only by a flashlight) she faces the death she’s invited. And it’s thrilling to watch Alden’s scenes with David Parkes as the frustrated, patient, well-meaning Creon, Pam Vogel as Antigone’s anxious sister Ismene, Margaret Kustermann as Antigone’s skeptical but tolerant nanny, Brad David Reed as the wisecracking guard, and Robert Schleifer as the hopeful but confused Haemon–here a deaf-mute who communicates with Antigone in sign language–and realize that you’re seeing that rare thing on a stage: genuine interaction between people who are actually thinking about what the others are saying. Their committed contact makes the legend’s archetypal figures acquire vivid, quirky lives of their own in this splendid show.
