Interview: Broadway's Ellen McLaughlin Presents A Radical Retelling Of 'Antigone' With KISSING THE FLOOR At Theatre Row

One Year Lease Theater Company will present the world premiere of Ellen McLaughlin's Kissing the Floor, directed by Ianthe Demos, running Off-Broadway February 23 - March 12, 2023 in a limited engagement at Theatre Row.

Kissing the Floor is a radical retelling of the Antigone myth. Set in Depression Era America, the play investigates the relationships among a set of siblings, all survivors of their family's agonized, infamous legacy. Annie and her disturbed and disturbing brother, Paul, are knotted together by fate and a tortured love as their sister Izzy and their brother Eddie look on with dismay and all too much understanding. Can one extricate oneself from a terrible past? What do we owe those who share our blood, however tainted?

The cast features Grammy and Obie Award winner Rinde Eckert, Leon Ingulsrud, Christina Bennett Lind and Akyiaa Wilson.

Behind the retelling is Ellen McLaughlin, a veteran actor and playwright who is perhaps best known to theatre fans for originating the role of "The Angel" in Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning juggernaut, Angels In America.

Outside of her iconic work on the stage, McLaughlin is a playwright in her own regard and has penned numerous adaptations of classic Greek myths that have enjoyed popular Off-Broadway, regional and international productions.

With a new adaptation on the way, BroadwayWorld had the opportunity to chat with Ellen before Kissing the Floor's Off-Broadway debut. Learn more Ellen's her latest work, and read her insights on why the classics enjoy continued relevance in the modern day, her feelings on Angels In America as the show approaches its 30th anniversary, and what she hopes audiences will take out of her radical new Antigone below!

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Why did you originally begin adapting Greek plays? How has your study of these classics shaped you as an artist?

The first adaptation I did was for Brian Kulick, who asked me to write a new version of Electra based on the Sophocles play for a new Oresteia he was producing in LA with the Actors' Gang theater. That version I wrote, along with a prologue and epilogue (versions of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia at Tauris) became my play, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, which premiered at CSC in NY in 1995. Then I was off and running and I have since been commissioned by many theaters to write adaptations of well over a dozen plays based on Greek sources. Some very free, like Kissing the Floor, and others hewing fairly close to the original, like my version of The Persians, which premiered in 2003 in NYC at the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan.

What the Greeks give me as a writer is courage and size, which I have dearly wanted, particularly as a young writer. Grappling with their work in any way will force a writer to put her money where her mouth is. You can't just make neat little plays that don't attempt anything they can't handle if you're dealing with the Greeks, and I've found that liberating. Scary in the right way. There is nothing tidy, nothing settled, at the end of a Greek play. These aren't nice pieces of literature you sit with your glass of sherry and savor; they bleed all over the floor if you try to bring them inside the house. Dealing with the Greeks released me from the obligation to write tidy, strictly naturalistic work. There's an exhilaration to the ambition, the chutzpah, of the Greeks. There is an understanding of what theater is supposed to do, which is to change the air we breathe. I wanted to engage with that and so the Greeks led me where they did.

Why did you choose the story of Antigone for your latest adaptation? Why did you feel it was relevant?

There are good reasons Antigone is the most adapted play in the canon of Greek tragedies and is generally the first Greek play most children are exposed to in school-it is suspiciously teachable. The characters are indelible-Antigone, the idealist who ritually buries her brother, a traitor to the state, and so is condemned to death and Creon, her uncle, the pragmatic and politic king who condemns her. She dies because of her dedication to ancient principles of honor and family loyalty; he acts in an effort to restore order after his brother-in-law Oedipus's tragedy and the mayhem of the ensuing events, including a civil war, only just concluded. The issues of the play are perpetually compelling-the private versus the public, the family versus the state, female versus male, youth versus age-and the inexorable pull of the plot is hard to screw up. It's one of those tragic dramaturgical engines that simply works, no matter the liberties taken. Which was perhaps the problem I ran into when I tried to adapt it myself. It can seem a bit too tidy, a foregone conclusion-Antigone is right, Creon is wrong. He is left broken and weeping at the end, the last of his family, his wife, son, and niece gone, all of whose deaths can be laid at his feet.

As a teacher, I always tell students approaching the Greeks to embrace the difficulties of the text and move toward the darkness-what challenges/disturbs/confuses-because that's where what matters about the play is for you. So when I took my own advice and headed into what I find most perplexing and disturbing, what kept me up at night, I ultimately arrived at how unsettling I find Antigone's refusal of life, the way that she privileges the dead over the living. She runs toward death despite her sister Ismene's pleas that she choose life, despite her upcoming marriage to Haeman, a man who clearly loves and respects her, and even despite not being sure that what she does will effectively save her brother from the limbo suffered by the souls of the unburied dead. There is a queasy and fascinating moment for her in the Sophocles in an exchange she has with the chorus as she is being taken to her death. She betrays some doubt about whether she has managed to do what she is about to die for, she wonders, almost to herself, if she will be welcomed by her brother when she joins him in the afterlife. It's just a second of doubt, but it's telling, that slight wobble from absolute certainty. It's not so much that she is afraid of death as that she is afraid of the dead. So I thought I would push on that a little.

The image that emerged for me out of the darkness and helped me to start was that of a woman lying on the floor, knocking in Morse code in an attempt to communicate with the dead, specifically her father, who she is convinced speaks to her in that way. Her sister Izzy, who frames the play, questions whether she really can hear the dead or if she's fooling herself. That remains an open question, one that Annie (my Antigone) can't answer with complete confidence. I also wanted to complicate Antigone's love of her brother by having him be a living person she could converse with, and an ethically challenging person to boot, just as, I would argue, is Polynices in the Sophocles play, a traitor whom no one in the city of Thebes would cross the street to spit on, but whom Antigone dies for. The play's concern with basic ideas of justice, of idealism pitted against pragmatism, and questions of what we owe to those we love and what we owe to the dead seem to me to be perpetually relevant, but particularly now when our preoccupations with these ethical conundrums are so urgent..

Kissing the Floor is set during the Great Depression. What is the significance of this time period for this particular piece?

Depression Era America seemed a fitting time period for this since it was an era when the distinction between the ruling class and the poor became blurred by the bewildering economic climate and the chaotic nature of the times. It's also the aftermath of a civil war and an era when the high and mighty are laid low. That sense of polarity, upheaval and mayhem seems pertinent in this time of division and dread in America.

This May marks 30 years since Angels in America: Millenium Approaches opened on Broadway. You worked closely with Tony Kushner for an extended period of time. What did you take out of that experience not only as an actor but as a writer?

What Angels did for writers all over the world, including me, was to challenge us to write ambitious work on a scale that we are frankly never encouraged to write on in America. We're encouraged by producers in particular to write small, tight, single set plays that are domestic in scope and easily producible. Tidy and forgettable. We're not encouraged to write plays that challenge the form, challenge convention. That play, because it was successful on that level, gave writers courage. It allowed us the sense that we could pursue a vision that was idiosyncratic and odd but mostly huge. Not all writers can write that play. There were a lot of plays inspired by Angels that didn't work, but I'd rather see a big fat mess that attempts something that's out of playwright's reach than to see a neat tight bundle that stays with me not at all.

The effect of that play on world theater, and in particular American theater, is entirely positive. So Tony gave me courage as a writer. But what I mostly remember from that time in my life was joy. I felt like we were doing something important with the medium that I had given my life to. That is one of the great privileges, the greatest gift I could have ever been given-to feel like I was doing something important in the world that was a direct response to the struggles of my time. I think Angels was one of the best examples of a playwright coming to terms with the political crisis of his time. And that's why, oddly enough, it continues to be relevant. I wish it wasn't, but the darkness that Tony foresaw as looming over the country has come to pass, in fact in ways far worse than even he could have anticipated.

The play asks nothing of us except that we listen and feel through the voyage these characters take. In doing so, we pay homage to the thousands on thousands who died during that time and we are also inspired to take up their battles, to be heard, to be seen, to make a difference, and continue their work, protect what we care about while we still can. It's always been this way. Indeed it's what Greek plays are saying to us, it's what every great play is saying to us. Take up the work of civilization with both hands and do what you can.

What do you hope audiences will take out of Kissing the Floor?

I always hope that audiences will experience what I experience when theater is at its best-I am taken on a journey, a sort of communal dream-immersed in a story in and in the lives of characters who are indelibly human and whose concerns become my own. The play is based on Antigone, and the power of the myth does much of the work, but I also believe that no audience member needs to be familiar with the Greek source for the play to have its effect. There is darkness there, god knows, but I hope too there will be beauty and power. I hope it keeps people up at night.

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Ellen McLaughlin's plays have been produced Off-Broadway, regionally and internationally. They include, Tongue of a Bird, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Trojan Women, Helen, The Persians, Penelope, Ajax in Iraq, Pericles, Septimus and Clarissa, Blood Moon, and The Oresteia. Producers include The Public Theater, National Actors' Theater, Classic Stage Co., New York Theater Workshop, The Guthrie, The Intiman, The Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors' Theater of Louisville, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Theatre, DC, Prototype, and The Almeida Theater in London.