Rhoda Feng at The Paris Review:
For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis.
It’s not hard to hazard the reasons for the renewed popularity of the Theban protestor who challenges the authoritarian rule of her uncle, King Creon, and is subsequently put to death. (One production titled its director’s note “Caution to the Resistance …”) But it is curious that, among the many iterations of Antigone now at hand, each has striven so forcefully to recast and reimagine her for the modern era.
more here.
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