There’s a bizarre absence of true conflict — or agon if you’re being fancy — in Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School),” a self-sabotaging drama which opened Wednesday at the Public. Ziegler’s feminist riff on Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy feints at grappling with up-to-date issues, but the new play, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, never finds any worthy combatants, neither in the world of the characters, nor, importantly, in reality.
What the production does find is an Antigone: Susannah Perkins, pale as a clenched fist, eyes like knuckles. Perkins is one of Off Broadway’s jewels — last season, they played a hilariously humorless German actor in Nazareth Hassan’s “Practice,” and they are probably best known as the hardest soccer kid in Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves.” Usually their immense self-possession has been employed to comic effect — I always think of a cat’s hauteur as it falls off a sofa. Here, though, Rafaeli has finally given Perkins a tragic part worthy of their stern, elsewhere air.
Ziegler wraps Antigone’s plot in a framing device, introduced by a character named Chorus, played by yet another theater mainstay, Celia Keenan-Bolger. But Chorus doesn’t look like a chorus: A single woman — in both senses of the phrase — Chorus is lost, 40 and fearfully pregnant. Isolation, rather than choral community, is her resting state.
The “I” in “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” belongs to Keenan-Bolger, and most of Ziegler’s uneven play exists in her rather panicky imagination. (This is one way that the show gives up on the source material’s combat-of-ideas — whatever happens, it’s all in one woman’s mind.) Chorus tells us that, on a plane, she sees a teenager (Perkins) reading “Antigone”; as they circle over Pittsburgh, the older woman plunges into her own bloody reverie, a half-ancient, half-contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ story.
The original version — Antigone’s uncle, King Creon, fumes when Antigone defies a state order and condemns his own sister’s child to death — has been tweaked to reflect Chorus’s anxiety about impending motherhood. In Chorus’s mind, Antigone is a grunge-y leather-jacketed kid dealing, like Chorus, with an unexpected pregnancy. Chorus’s version of Creon (Tony Shalhoub) is a straw-man despot — a purity-obsessed politician, passing draconian anti-abortion laws. (He’s also a mess, either spitting venom or whining.)
The show does look great: David Zinn’s set turns the stage into a forgotten palace ballroom, dim and clearly used for storage, chandeliers overhead and dark-painted paneling everywhere else. (Jen Schriever’s faint lighting design doesn’t shine so much as it drifts along, catching on things.) As scenes change, props establish an atmosphere of horror. For instance, Antigone gets a botched abortion in the back of an unclean shop, which is depicted by a single dusty bodega counter.
At the show’s climax, when Antigone and Creon duel over bodily autonomy, Perkins strips down with total, commanding dignity. Each scar, each indentation is important. “These ears, these eyes, this hair, these knees: If there’s anything we have in this world, that’s it. Your own body is it.” It’s Ziegler’s finest scene, and a hypnotically strong performance, but then, as keeps happening throughout the show, that Chorus horns in with her own — let’s be honest — less important concerns.
Typically, Greek choruses contextualize a tragic plot by addressing wider existential issues. Ziegler’s one-woman Chorus, though, considers only herself. Mostly, Chorus worries about being a stifled person — she hopes to learn outspokenness from Antigone — and her show-ending triumph is that she finally hears her inner voice. This fun discovery happens as Antigone bleeds out in front of her. Maybe, I don’t know, apply pressure first?
Keenan-Bolger has a real gift for pathos, but in a two hour and 15 minute show, her steady state of woe-is-me grows tired. Who is oppressing the Chorus again? No Creon-like authority tells her to have or not have her baby. Her ambivalence is about being “afraid to step into her own life.” I started to wonder how the play might have worked without her entirely.
I admire the concept of tying reproductive politics to “Antigone” but not the way the play keeps trampling over its own ideas. A bunch of baffled cops, wandering into the sad aftermath, tries to work out what tragedy has ensued. A male cop describes his confusion as a feeling of walking into “someone else’s book.” The female cop replies, portentously, “Now you know how it feels. To be a girl in the world.” Gosh, Cop 1, I don’t know about that. Antigone has been a lead character for 2,500 years. There are problems we could be talking about here, but all of them go far beyond being left out of a story.
Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) Through April 5 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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