Review: ANTIGONE Reawakens at BAM

With King Kreon in exile, the birds of Thebes had their fill. The air was bitter with the stench of unburied corpses lying on the battlefield. Two of those peck-eaten bodies were brothers who killed each other for their father's throne.

For Oidipous at Kolonos, Sophokles, that classic dramatist of old Hellas, spills the blood of a royal family with utter profusion. The exile of Kreon follows the suicide of his queen, which is then preceded by fratricidal competition for rule.

The tragic denouement of Sophokle's trilogy, known as the Theban Plays, began with Antigone. In 441 B.C. Sophokles embarked on a terminal literary quest spanning over three decades that would not end until a year after his death, when Oidipous at Kolonos was finally produced.

Literally meaning "before birth," Antigone, under the directorial helm of Dutch visionary Ivo van Hove, is a feast of neo-classical modernity. Beneath the rough-hewn Ionic architecture inside the BAM Harvey Theater on Fulton Street, Antigone spellbound a full house to mythic proportions.

Struck by the starlight of the beloved Parisian doused in Hollywood glitz, full-house audiences flocked to the name, Juliette Binoche. Gainfully respected for her role in European cineaste Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue, she later became an American icon after Chocolat with Johnny Depp.

Her recent role in the film Clouds of Sils Maria uncannily depicted the life of a famous actress transitioning from film to the stage. Interestingly, the curtains fall on Hove's Antigone as audiences peer above stage at the last scene, a filmed projection highlighting the enviable mien of Binoche.

Antigone is a myth, Binoche asserted, as she sat candidly with New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch for the post-show talk. She emphasized the importance of myth as a way of knowledge, as timeless, transcending history, which is altogether different than intellectualizing political interpretations. Myths are about consciousness and heart, she said, with an earnest tone.

And finally, Antigone, Binoche posited, is about the rebirth of the feminine. The rebellious act of her burying Polyneikes, who perished with his sword raised high against the throne, is also a term of divine respect for the homeland, for the earth. Truly, burial rites are steeped in ecological consciousness, honoring the ground and the inherent forces of nature within every living being.

An especially eloquent woman from the crowd reinforced such themes, where family plays a central role in the tragic circumstances of a woman beholden to filial piety over legislative authority. The tragedy of Kreon is mythical, a universal principle, as in the Greek concept of kósmos, where natural law and social rule are in perpetual conflict. Sophokles' tragic treatment of family order, and disorder, is essentially a microcosm for the problems of human and divine intervention in the midst of imposing rule over the greater society.

The tragedy of Antigone is best understood in the translation of her name, "before birth" meaning that hers was a life yet to be. More, she was as distilled into mere idea, never reaching the birth of her life as truly hers.

Antigone was the daughter of an exiled King and a suicidal mother, and sister to fratricidal brothers. She met her fate under the iron fist of state law, of course instituted by her father. Albeit suffused with uninhibited human pride, she sought refuge in the divine order of a burial rite.

By burying her brother ceremonially, according to traditional, pagan Greek respect for the gods, she crossed a fatal line. Honoring the dead, she stepped into her own grave. This, in and of itself, is a perfect metaphor for the very immutability of the tragedy, where the delineation between myth and history becomes clear.

The Greek myth could not have been better conveyed than in the contemporary poetics of translator Ann Carson, who furnished ingenious dialogue to allow the actors' self-confessed linguistic indulgence, and for the public a most welcome, listenable resonance with the everyday tongue.

As in the incomparable voice of the Bard, Hove's direction broods on the peerless spark of Sophokles, a master of the subtlest of horrors, where the slightest tinge of poison stains the edge of a crystal. He's a prophet of mental unease, a purveyor of the essential substance of tragic drama.

The style of Hove is likened to another Dutch director, the iconoclastic filmmaker Lars von Trier, where sparsely set actions only underline the movement of dialogue, often like vocal eruptions out into ether, offering nothing more than the bare, silent tension of the play reduced to an almost alchemical instinct.

Suited modernly, Patrick O'Kane played Kreon like a vehement business-attired CEO at wit's end. In the role of Guard and part of the Chorus, Obi Abili breathed truth into the life of his character, garnering well-deserved laughter amid the mournful hemorrhaging that the main narrative arc stirs.

In fact, Abili briefly mentioned a personal anecdote about incidents following the death of his father in a village in Nigeria, where traditional burial rites became a challenge to the family. Curiously, his role as mediator between Kreon and Antigone mirrored that which he had to assume in his father's village and for the resolve of his family.

The directorial merging of the Greek chorus, and central characters began as a practical choice for Hove, who was forced to tour Antigone on a restrictive budget. Yet, this rare revisionary approach to Sophokles, and classical Greek drama as a whole, is sharply engrossing.

In every social order, there are public personas. Celebrities, artists, politicians, etc., are like the actors of antiquity on the stage of life. And then there is the public, or as most were known in ancient days, the mob, embodied in the classical Greek theatrical device of the chorus. In other words, the chorus is the voice of most people, the vox populi.

A more elevated conceptualization would place the persona as the gods, whose lives are mythical, and who were represented in the characteristic Greek aesthetic of life in movement as dramatic, opposed to the purely spiritual, archetypal immortality of the Egyptian Pharaoh, from where the original inspiration derives.

At the theater, the audience becomes the chorus, the bittersweet, enchanted echoes of the people who are fated to experience life through preconceived dramaturgy. In Hove's Antigone, the actors themselves become part-chorus, that is part-audience, enacting the epochal truths which Sophokles himself had conveyed, of the human perspective, especially the actor, as mere witness to the play of life as myth.

Four days before opening night, the Brooklyn Book Festival's "Antigone Interpreted" mused on Sophokles to the extent where classic theater becomes a metaphor and an example of democracy in action. The chorus is the voting public, and the actors the ruling legislature. In comparison with the stoicism of divine intervention, democracy is arguably what makes people human.

"A real democracy should allow its citizens to fulfill religious duties toward family without colliding with the laws of society," wrote Hove in his director's note neatly printed in the BAM playbill. Ancient history echoes into modernity with the perpetual challenge to reconcile the divergence of state secularism in contrast with state religion, still contentious in countries like Greece, Israel, Iran, and other state cultures with a dominant religious paradigm.

Bonnie Honig, scholar of democratic theory, and author of Antigone, Interrupted, spoke at the Brooklyn Book Festival of Antigone as dissident theater. That the struggle between the characters in the play is unresolved, only silenced by death, is a testament to the classist suppression of women who were disallowed the right to mourn in ancient Greece.

Today, this struggle continues globally, and in America, for example, in the politicization and ignorance that ensues in the wake of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. There are innumerable examples of how this issue of respectful burial remains a crucial source of reflection for everyone in the world today. From the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, respecting the dead should transcend every prevailing political quandary.

Yet, as in the play of Antigone, and in the ageless myth from which the story was drawn, this is not the case. Those rare individuals self-motivated to the task of burying, or ceremonially recognizing the spiritual passage of the demoralized dead often do so at great political, and personal risk.

Antigone is ultimately about justice. There are some who will knowingly face death before the unforgiving will of the state for what they believe is right, even if that belief is simply to perform a ritual, to continue a tradition, to hold a ceremony.

As in the prehistory of humanity, mourning is a memorial act. When the state controls memory, people are disempowered, quickly vulnerable to ignorance and illusion. Memory, like myth, is also a way to knowledge. By ritualizing the burial of her insurgent brother, the grieving Antigone ceases to differentiate between his death and death itself.

In the midst of so much death, her act is human, because she knowingly embraces mortality. The myth of Antigone teaches how the foundation of humanism originates from the ceremonial recognition of death.

If the quality of the questions raised from the public within the neoclassical-styled Harvey Theater is any indication, the passage of twenty-five hundred years has not in the least dulled the popular fascination for such universal perplexities.

The cautionary tale of a woman who confronts an untimely mortal fate because she honors the dead is of perennial importance to every culture. The myth of memory as tradition holds the most tragic, and therefore most potent elements of human life.

Photo Credit: Jan Versweyveld

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