'Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)' Off-Broadway review — a Greek tragedy revision for the post-Roe era

Read our review of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) off Broadway, Anna Ziegler's adaptation of Sophocles's play that blends ancient and modern settings.

Summary

• Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) reimagines Sophocles's Antigone by making the title character a teen who defies the law by getting an abortion
• The play is narrated by a Chorus in the form of a modern woman who imagines Antigone's experiences in the context of her own The play's heavy-handed writing flattens its themes of bodily autonomy; unjust laws; and how literature shapes our worldviews

At the start of Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), a contemporary narrator known only as the Chorus (Celia Keenan-Bolger) slips from her seat on a plane back to an anachronistic Ancient Thebes to shadow her favorite literary ghost, Antigone (Susannah Perkins). The late King Oedipus and Queen Jocasta's unruly and defiant daughter is nonchalant, wearing a black leather jacket, blocky Doc Martens, and a plaid skirt as if it were a button-down haphazardly tied around the waist. Antigone has skipped her uncle Creon’s coronation in favor of bar hopping, propelled by her disdain at the ritual and perhaps the kingdom more generally.

Perkins, to their credit, stares down the role and its many challenges like a bull glaring at a matador. How to make Antigone — this legendary figure of independence, incendiary power, and generational rebellion — newly alive and recontextualized as a modern-ish teenager hungry for the world's pleasures? Their septum ring catches the light in certain scenes, glinting like their mischievous gaze toward an amusingly frail and fumbling Creon (Tony Shalhoub), but there’s only so much Perkins can do with a script that spends too much time turning Antigone’s dissident actions into lackluster poetry.

Ziegler’s mix of memory play and revisionist reclamation takes the air out of its most compelling premises. Instead of disobeying Creon's law by burying her exiled brother as in Sophocles's original play, Ziegler's Antigone’s act of revolution is getting an abortion. Though there is poignancy in reworking the play as a response to the post-Roe v. Wade era, this Antigone has a strange distrust of its audience to go with its absurdity (what if Ancient Thebes were Pittsburgh in the ’70s or ’80s?). By spelling them out, it flattens intriguing themes about bodily autonomy, the rigidity of written law, people's connections to ancestry and imagined pasts, and how great literature changes our perspective on the world.

The play ends up as an uneasy mix of pastiche and anachronism. It seemingly aspires to recall the late ’90s-early ’00s era of teen film adaptations of classics, like Clueless, O, and Easy A. But even at these movies' most melodramatic, there’s still a lightness and, most importantly, a trust in their audiences to understand their riffs on the original works' themes. Ziegler’s script underlines everything in red pen.

Making Sophocles hip is not in and of itself objectionable, but the show jumps between big ideas like the literal body politic (the organism of government and its rulings over people’s bodies) and the relationship between law and personal liberation in a way that prizes exposition over practice. These rhetorical threads are delivered with the force of a sledgehammer, articulated in a grammar that telegraphs urgency but instead lands as overwrought and lacking in specificity. Ziegler's take leaves little room to interpret Antigone on terms beyond gender and sex, all but phasing out the elements of familial loyalty from the original drama.

The turgid impulses of Ziegler’s writing — including a laughable line where Keenan-Bolger says, “[Antigone] taught me I was enough!” — sacrifice both Antigone's and Perkins’s ability to display their shared insurgency, magnitude, and furious iconoclasm.

Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) summary

When a woman known as the Chorus spots a teen reading Antigone on a plane, she blends her own history with that of Sophocles’s play, setting in motion a reimagined story of the young daughter of King Oedipus and Queen Jocasta, disobeying the law and challenging her newly coronated uncle Creon’s rule of Ancient Thebes.

What to expect at Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)

David Zinn’s production design is on the spare side, with occasional carts, chairs, and podiums populating the stage, and the giant columns of the Public’s Anspacher Theater getting intermittent attention. Jen Schreiver’s lighting is straightforward until overhead fluorescents glow an ominous emerald, enlivening the show with some much-appreciated stylistic flourishes.

What audiences are saying about Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)

Audiences have shared mixed responses to Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) on forums like the theatre review and tracking app Mezzanine.

• “This show didn’t really work for me. It felt a bit confused — between the reinvention of the original show, the inclusion of the present, etc. But the acting was great!” - Mezzanine user Jeffrey Rubel
• “absolutely beautiful. Currently have no words to describe what an experience.” Mezzanine user molly koch
• “Very intense and poignant to our times. Glad I won tickets to this one!” - Mezzanine user Tamara Litt

Who should see Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)

• Antigone is a showcase for Celia Keenan-Bolger’s dive into a woman's past and relationship to the literary legend.
• Sussanah Perkins imbues their Antigone with brashness, fun, and a spiky wit.
• Tony Shalhoub is always excellent as an unsteady straight man, and his King Creon, wrought with humor and pathos, humanizes a man caught in the web of a system he’s now in charge of.

Learn more about Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)

Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) is at once too literal and uncertain of which theatrical and aesthetic pathways it wants to take, between self-serious revisionism and enlivening remix. The show’s ambition to make Sophocles’s heroic insurgent an of-the-moment avatar for bodily autonomy and women's rights cracks under its over-literal, overwrought writing. It constrains Antigone’s unruliness instead of liberating it, and her.

Learn more and get Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) tickets on New York Theatre Guide. Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) is at The Public Theater through April 5.

Photo credit: Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) off Broadway. (Photos by Joan Marcus)