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Fatal adaption
Antigone gets a modern makeover
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Creon doesn’t exactly trade his cothurns for cowboy boots in Richard McElvain’s new, contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone. He does, however, call himself a "straight shooter" atop the "stallion" of the state. Certainly McElvain wishes to draw parallels between the daughter of Oedipus’s being persecuted for obeying the dictates of her conscience and the sacrifice of our own freedoms to stuff like the Patriot Act. It even sounds as if it might work — until you actually sit through this jarring Antigone, with its odd incursions of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, its Southern-cracker Army sergeant substituting "Sweet Zeus" for the exclamation "Sweet Jesus" and its heroine beginning her journey toward death with the announcement that she’s "hitching a ride to Hades." The Nora Theatre Company commissioned respected translator, adapter, director, and Elliot Norton Award–winning actor McElvain’s modern Antigone and has gone to some pains to mount it, complete with effective original music by Dewey Dellay to augment the Choruses — which McElvain bravely retains, albeit reduced, reworded, and dotted with fragments of Shakespeare sonnets and the "What a piece of work is a man!" speech from Hamlet. You may momentarily think you’re listening to a techno version of Hair. Indeed, in this wrongheaded enterprise, it is the most daring choices that prove the worst. The pity is that McElvain, as a sad-eyed, tight-lipped, bullying Creon, and Marianna Bassham, as a sinewy but truly touching Antigone, are giving fine performances you’d like to respond to. But every time you’re on the verge of being moved, some fresh bit of ludicrousness pops up, whether it’s the sergeant’s calling Antigone a "little peach" who fell on her brother’s corpse like "a chicken on a June bug" or the ghost of Polyneices beckoning to his sister with the greeting "Hey Tiggy!" McElvain follows Sophocles’s plot and structure closely, removing the action to a modern quasi police state governed by an iron-fisted Creon backed up by business-suited bureaucrats, the Choragos replaced by a savvy female adviser whom Donna Sorbello plays with shades of Allison Janney on The West Wing. In the opening scene, Antigone and her sister Ismene confer frantically in the dark as an armed guard briefly falls asleep at his post. The conflict between Creon, a sexist ideologue trying to maintain order and avert terror, and the equally stubborn Antigone, who answers to a Higher Authority, is clearly laid out. Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with McElvain’s go-for-broke portrayal of Creon as a paternalistic modern leader with a gift for rhetoric, a quick-trigger temper, and an ulcer coming on who is heartbreakingly brought low. Or with Bassham’s transition from smart-alecky defiance to poignant, St. Joan–like realization of her fate, a realization the actress plays with affecting urgency, undeterred by such McElvain bloopers as her colloquial chat with a ghost ("Polyneices?" "Bingo") and a recitation of "Because I could not stop for death,/He kindly stopped for me—." But Sophocles’s plays have a formality that does not respond well to having cornpone, crudeness, or even Emily Dickinson sprinkled on. Moreover, removal to a modern, secular state does not sit comfortably on a play that, though it generally demonstrates the dangers of inflexibility, hinges in the end on the necessity of placing the gods’ laws above human ones, piousness above pride. As to the contemporary American parallels, the born-again Bush and his allies would likely invoke and even exploit, rather than defy, "the gods." (Given the non-Sophoclean references to stoning, perhaps McElvain also means to target Middle Eastern tyrants like Saddam Hussein.) Although much of the action would seem to take place in Creon’s inner sanctum, amid the terrified suits who also serve as the Chorus when not ducking out to fill other roles, Brynna Bloomfield’s set appears to have been inspired by the opening scene: a graffiti-defaced concrete-block wall (it also serves as scrim) and urban infrastructure. There’s little that’s inept in Daniel Gidron’s direction, though faced with a Teiresias so utterly incapable of conveying blindness, he might have thought of some sort of eye covering. And the performances are committed, with convincing turns by Sorbello as both the Choragos and Eurydice and by Jim Spencer as Haemon. The problem isn’t even with the idea. After all, it worked for Jean Anouilh, whose 1942 rewrite of Sophocles was first performed in Paris during the German occupation. Where the buck stops here is at the script. There should have been a law against it — gods’ or man’s would do.
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