{"id":161638,"date":"2026-03-12T18:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T18:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/161638\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T18:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T18:56:10","slug":"antigone-this-play-i-read-in-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/161638\/","title":{"rendered":"Antigone (this play i read in high school)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theater review by Adam Feldman\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Anna Ziegler\u2019s Antigone (this play i read in high school), the Chorus has an uncanny encounter with a teenage girl on an airplane. This Chorus is nicknamed Dicey, and is played with perforated steeliness by Celia Keenan-Bolger<\/a>; the girl, a student played with insouciant directness by Susannah Perkins, is reading Antigone, Sophocles\u2019s tragedy of protest and punishment in ancient Thebes. Antigone\u2019s behavior in the face of punishment has haunted Dicey throughout her life: an implicit spirit of reproach to her own lack of courage. She finds herself explaining, she says, \u201chow literary characters can stalk you sometimes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus<\/p>\n

The sense of being shadowed by Antigone may feel familiar to New York theatergoers. Variations on her story are everywhere now. She was a side character in Robert Icke\u2019s Oedipus<\/a> on Broadway; Alexander Zeldin’s modern British take on her, The Other Place<\/a>, just closed at the Shed, but Jean Anouilh\u2019s 1944 version<\/a> is at the Flea and Barbara Barclay\u2019s Antigone in Analysis<\/a> begins next week at La MaMa. The challenge resides in finding ways to adapt a 2,500\u2013year-old tragedy\u2014in which Antigone\u2019s cause relates to the burial of her disgraced brother\u2014to modern purposes. The girl on the plane, for one, is unimpressed with the Sophocles original. \u201cIs it even about her?\u201d she complains. \u201cIt seems like it\u2019s all about her brother\u2019s body. A man\u2019s body.\u201d Dicey, who implicitly stands in for Ziegler \u00e0 la Liberation<\/a>, takes the point, tapping into her \u201cancient voice\u201d (\u201can ancient anger, even\u201d) to recenter the narrative. \u201cI\u2019m going to tell you a different story,\u201d she imagines promising her infant self. \u201cAbout Antigone\u2019s body and also your own.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus<\/p>\n

The resulting retelling begins with a funny, spiky scene in which a reckless Antigone (Perkins), a celebrity embracing the sense of scandal that hangs over her family, flirts with a waiter named Achilles (Ethan Dubin)\u2014\u201dBut, like, not the Achilles. It\u2019s just a name that my parents gave me\u201d\u2014despite being affianced to her gentle cousin Haemon (Calvin Leon Smith). Why not? It\u2019s her body. And it\u2019s also her body when, somewhat later, she finds herself with child and takes steps to terminate the pregnancy. But Thebes\u2019s new ruler, her uncle Creon (a sympathetic, thought-tormented Tony Shalhoub), has enacted harsh new anti-abortion laws, which forces her to seek help from the\u00a0sharkish\u00a0Proprietor (Katie Kreisler) of a back-alley chop shop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus<\/p>\n

Handled with proper care, this could be the basis of a compelling new vision of Antigone. But Ziegler\u2019s play is, at times, quite bafflingly sloppy. Early on, for example, while providing \u201cAntigone 101\u201d background, Dicey says that Oedipus \u201cwas famously cursed to murder his father and sleep with his mother\u2014which he did and then promptly killed himself.\u201d But he didn\u2019t kill himself, of course; famously, he blinded himself. Is this a deliberate howler, intended to make Dicey\u2019s narration unreliable? It\u2019s hard to tell, because so much of the rest of the show and Tyne Rafaeli\u2019s direction of it at the Public are tonally chaotic. Ziegler loads Dicey with a heavy-handed metaphor about finding her voice, in too-stark contrast with Creon\u2019s mute wife. There are clumsy stabs at comedy\u2014a trio of cops speak in broad Boston accents; a palace guard (Dave Quay) keeps dropping his papers\u2014and a few even clumsier stabs at impassioned rhetoric, as when Antigone\u2019s sister, Ismene (Haley Wong), in a traffic jam of metaphors, declares: \u201cI won\u2019t let my body be a stage on which men wage their wars or forge their laws.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus<\/p>\n

Such problems would be less damaging if this were not also the kind of highly serious play about bodily autonomy that winds up with its lead actress defiantly nude and\/or hemorrhaging blood from her privates. But Perkins rises to the demands of her role heroically, with an unforced self-possession that brings out the best aspects of the writing. (When she says, of her pregnancy, \u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d that\u2019s all the justification required.) In her performance, as in Shalhoub\u2019s, one gets a sense of the play\u2019s unusual sense of destiny, of submitting to personal decisions so overdetermined that choice isn\u2019t quite the right word: \u201cI won\u2019t. I will but I don\u2019t want to,\u201d says Antigone at a crisis point. \u201cI want to but I can\u2019t. I won\u2019t. I have to.\u201d Such moments make one hope that Ziegler will continue refining the play beyond this shaky world premiere. Her vision is promising, but in need of revision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Antigone (this play i read in high school). Public Theater (Off Broadway<\/a>). By Anna Ziegler. Directed by Tyne Rafaeli. With Susannah Perkins, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Tony Shalhoub, Calvin Leon Smith, Haley Wong, Katie Kreisler, Ethan Dubin, Dave Quay. Running time: 2hr 10mins. One intermission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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