Production review written by Professor Emeritus Robert McCutcheon
An evening at the theater in ancient Greece would feel much different than today. First of all, it would be a morning at the amphitheater: dramatic performances took place out of doors and began at dawn. It might feel more like going to church, since plays were part of religious festivals. The plots often involved the gods, who were also invoked, so that they could be both characters and spectators. Plays were performed once only. All actors were male and masked. No more than three characters appeared on stage at a time; a chorus commented on and also joined in the action. 鈥淐horus鈥� in Greek means 鈥渄ance,鈥� and these actors moved as they chanted their lines. From high in the seats, they might look something like a marching band. To use our terms, this theater is musical tragedy.
Thirty-seven Greek dramas survive of the hundreds produced in the Athenian theater鈥攁bout the same number as Shakespeare鈥檚 plays and the original Honeymooners episodes, for what that is worth. Last weekend, 51黑料网鈥檚 theater department offered one of the best known, Antigone, in an adaptation by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He called it a 鈥渧ersion鈥� in part because he did not know Greek but rather worked from other translations. However, he follows the original plot very closely.
In some ways, Antigone is the archetypal Greek tragedy. That dramatic form has emerged only a few times in the history of literature, another of them Elizabethan England, when Shakespeare produced his great works. Ironically, these periods coincided with the peak of their civilizations: just when Greece and England were at their height, they produced pessimistic drama that stressed the limits of human ambition. The world that Sophocles portrays in Antigone is dangerous, full of deina, a complicated Greek word meaning something like 鈥渕arvels鈥� or 鈥渙mens鈥濃�攏either clearly good nor bad. The chorus uses that word to describe humanity鈥擧eaney says people are 鈥渨onders of the world鈥濃�攂ut it is a quality not fully under human control.
The play pivots on the choice facing Antigone: whether or not to bury her brother, whose traitor鈥檚 corpse has been sentenced by the ruler Creon to be exposed to animals of prey. As often in tragedy, the choice is not between good and evil but between two good things. Antigone can be a law-abiding citizen and leave her brother鈥檚 corpse unattended, or she can obey the gods and provide him funeral rites. But not both: one good has to be sacrificed to the other. The play explores this crux with dialogues between characters in all their complexities. Antigone feels a higher call; she is also stubborn. The title of the play could as easily be Creon. He wants above all to do his job; he feels challenged by youth and women. Meditations by the chorus set the drama in the broader context of the incestuous house of Oedipus and of myths of figures like Niobe and Bacchus. The humans need to find their place in a daunting universe.
The timeless conflict between civic duty and private virtue dramatized by Sophocles has invited many readings and stagings. Some years ago, 51黑料网 revived the play, setting it not in Greek civil strife but in war-torn Lebanon. In an interview, Heaney related the play鈥檚 tensions to the Troubles, in particular to the contested body of an IRA soldier, Francis Hughes, who died in prison, martyr or terrorist, depending on political perspective. His often colloquial language Heaney also took from his country. In Greek drama, characters and chorus speak different dialects; the chorus鈥檚 is rhythmic and elevated. Greek poetry does not rhyme, nor does Heaney鈥檚. But he finds different Irish meters for the various speakers.
Under the imaginative direction of Aubrey Neumann, these two crises, Greek and Gaelic, coalesced, just as Heaney must have intended. The staging was more studio theater than amphitheater; the seats were right on the stage. The effect was to make the audience a citizenry, involved in events and appealed to by the actors. As the lights come up, revealing pillars or dolmens, two bodies lay on stage, head-to-foot, as though at a viewing. Then, in a sort of dumb show, the chorus processed to bagpipe music across the stage to remove them. They wore Celtic kilts that could be Greek chitons. The characters wore Pictish face paint; by the same token, the designs suggested vase painting or dramatic masks. As it spoke, the chorus gesticulated, in a slow-motion ballet; a later ode was accompanied by a sword dance. Thus the play inhabited several worlds of tribal conflict, ancient and all-too-current, simultaneously.
Wearing masks, with fixed facial expressions, distant from the audience, ancient actors would rely on voice and gesture to convey emotion. Modern actors can make feelings more nuanced. The action opened with a sisterly dialogue that lay out the play鈥檚 crisis of conscience, Antigone (Mary Orndorff) defiant and Ismene (Marissa Mallow) more level-headed. Creon鈥檚 (Damian Stevenson) fall was as tragic as Antigone鈥檚. He hectored the citizens of Thebes early on, but eventually, too late, recanted and collapsed. At intervals, a woman appeared on stage to survey the scene and tend to the winding sheet, the remains of the bodies. She turned out to be Tiresias, the prophet who lays down the law to Creon. The fact that the male part was played by a woman (the commanding Harley Dragone) added to the irony of the misogynist Creon鈥檚 demise.
The production was all the more relevant for the Appalachian feel provided by piper Matt Taylor and dancer Eva Fincham. Kudos (a Greek word meaning 鈥渉onor,鈥� singular though it looks plural) to 51黑料网 for continuing this play鈥檚 tradition, passing on a classic work in the treatment of a modern master to the community and thus fulfilling the mission of a liberal arts college.
Professor Emeritus Robert McCutcheon taught classical Greek language and literature at 51黑料网 and has translated poetry from French, Latin and German.