Burial plot

The ART revisits Antigone

by Scott T. Cummings

Maybe Bush and Gore should take a lesson from the Greeks. When Oedipus gave up the throne of ancient Thebes following a major sex scandal, his two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, had equal claim to be head of state, so they agreed to rule in alternate years. That worked out until Eteocles refused to vacate the Theban White House one year. With the aid of a foreign army, Polynices laid siege to his seven-gated home town. In hand-to-hand combat (not vote counting), the brothers slew each other, plunging the nation into a legal and political crisis.

This, of course, is the back story for Sophocles's Antigone, which opens the American Repertory Theatre's Loeb Drama Center season this weekend in a production directed by associate director François Rochaix. When I stopped by rehearsals a few days after Election Tuesday, the Florida recount controversy was giving the play a crackling immediacy, supporting Rochaix's contention that there is no more contemporary theater in the world than that of Athens in the fifth century BC.

For the Swiss director, the media carnival that is a US presidential election pales in comparison to the titanic contests of Greek tragedy. "The past few weeks," he says, "when I was at home preparing my rehearsals, I always kept NPR on and listened to news of the presidential campaign. The confrontation of the two was strong, violent, and very interesting: the real, deeply political, Sophoclean debate versus these two politicians whose main purpose is to be likable and to be funny in order to get votes. No interesting issue was raised at all. This is where these big Greek texts become totally contemporary. Of course, the issues raised by the political debate in Antigone could be raised by Gore and Bush in terms of today. The fact that they don't do it shows that there is not anymore a real political debate."

As many a high-school student can tell you, the political debate in Antigone is between its eponymous hero, daughter of the cursed Oedipus and sister to the slain warrior brothers, and Creon, Antigone's uncle and the next in line for the Theban throne. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Creon moves to right the ship of state and assert his leadership; he orders a state funeral for Eteocles, who died defending the city, and decrees that the body of the traitor Polynices shall be left to rot on the battlefield. Antigone, however, believes that her duty to blood relations and to the gods to honor the dead with proper ceremony trumps Creon's civil law, even if a martyr's death is the consequence. In a tragedy, this kind of battle of wills guarantees catastrophe, and the audience, along with the important on-stage chorus of Theban citizens, watches the inevitable unfold as an anonymous sentry, Antigone's sister, Creon's son and wife, and the blind prophet Tiresias all get caught up in the action.

The ART production features Aysan Çelik as Antigone and John Douglas Thompson as Creon. For Thompson, who joins the company for a second season, the most challenging part of creating Creon is justifying his actions: "Why he does what he does and why he goes so far. He seems as if he's just a hard-liner. He's not going to give an inch. He's incredibly stubborn, but there have to be reasons and humanity behind it. We all know stubborn people who do things to the point where it is detrimental to them and they don't even know it."

Çelik returns to the ART a little more than a year after graduating from its Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, which Rochaix heads. For her, the key to Antigone is "to make it believable that she has such absolute faith in what she is doing. There is some extra leap that has to be made that is probably about me trusting my instinct about what to do with a certain moment or to be unapologetic for it. For such extremity of behavior to be believable, you have to believe she has that faith."

Antigone completes a kind of Greek trilogy for Rochaix at the ART. He staged Aeschylus's Oresteia in 1994 and Euripides's Bacchae in 1997. This year he is "discovering Sophocles," first with the students of the Institute and now in a mainstage production. Rochaix has reminded Çelik and Thompson that their performances will be combatting notions that some audiences have already formed. "Everybody speaks of the villain Creon and the martyr Antigone," he points out. "It is not so black and white. We have to remember that the Athenians had a lot of sympathy for Creon; he defends the practical and political laws of a city against the old, aristocratic family laws that Antigone represents. We call this play Antigone, but it should be called Antigone and Creon."

Antigone is at the American Repertory Theatre, in repertory November 24 through January 17. Tickets are $25 to $59. Call 547-8300.