As a result of Antigone buries her lifeless brother, Creon sentences her to demise. That brother, Polynices, will not be even talked about by title in Anna Ziegler’s provocative play “Antigone (This Play I Learn in Excessive Faculty),” which opened Wednesday on the Public Theater. This wild, new Antigone even goes as far as to complain concerning the Zophocles authentic: “(It’s) not even about her. It looks like it’s all about her brother’s physique. A person’s physique.”
Ziegler isn’t writing about what to do with a lifeless physique. She’s writing about what to do with an unborn physique and what proper the state possesses to regulate a girl’s physique. Sophocles’ Antigone proclaims the prevalence of divine regulation to human regulation, and, likewise, Ziegler’s Antigone makes the case that the well being of the human physique is superior to the physique of the political state.
There’s a creepy fascination to a whole lot of Greek tragedy: the incest in “Oedipus,” the rotting corpse in “Antigone.” It might be a bit disappointing to be taught that Ziegler tackles what appears to be a much less ghoulish matter. Tyne Rafael’s route handles that attainable remorse by instantly flipping our perceptions of Antigone and Creon: Susannah Perkins is edgy and threatening within the title position, and Tony Shalhoub is good and really relatable in his tackle the tyrant-king, who isn’t all that far faraway from the actor’s Adrian Monk. What Ziegler makes clear is that weak rulers want unjust legal guidelines to keep up their energy. Right here, Shalhoub reeks weak point.
Perkins’ efficiency is one thing else solely. This Antigone’s fierce independence and unpredictability is her energy, and it’s there proper on the high of Ziegler’s play when Antigone picks up Achilles (Ethan Dubin) at a neighborhood bar in Thebes and dumps her quicker than any man Samantha screwed in “Intercourse and the Metropolis.”
Haemon, Antigone’s fiancé, may be very a lot the son of Shalhoub’s Creon, and Calvin Leon Smith performs him with monumental attraction. Antigone tells Haemon that she’s pregnant, and Haemon is thrilled. Antigone has different plans. Abortion is prohibited in Thebes however accessible by a again alley abortionist (Katie Kreisler, being lethally good within the position).
Taking part in the Refrain, Celia Keenan-Bolger narrates “Antigone” in a job that might extra precisely be referred to as the Creator. It’s she who learn Sophocles’ tragedy in highschool, a revelation she delivers as if everybody had learn “Antigone,” a lot much less in highschool. She now finds herself pregnant.
There are a whole lot of speeches in Ziegler’s play, lots of them laced with a subversive up to date wit and a bracing grip on what it means to present beginning or not. Her “Antigone” doesn’t have the ghoulish fascination of the unique; nevertheless, as depicted right here, beginning and abortion might be way more scary. The play ends with Keenan-Bolger and Perkins in a decent embrace, one which excludes males — even a good-guy like Smith’s Haemon. Males are mere bystanders right here.
