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Each little red star is a clickable link to additional information on whatever listing it appears beside. It might be a link to an article in a local newspaper, or it might be a press release the company has sent me.“Another Antigone”
Posted by Gail M. Burns - June 2010
In the two weeks since I saw and reviewed Tina Packer’s Women of Will at Shakespeare & Company, people have been telling me that they won’t buy a ticket to see it because they believe they are too uneducated to enjoy it. “That’s a show for Shakespeare scholars, like you, Gail.” Any true Shakespeare scholar worth his or her salt would be doing a classic spit take to hear that. I am NOT a “scholar” of any ilk. I know a little bit of everything and a great deal of nothing.
And yet I am always wary of plays that assume too much of an audience because its no fun to sit in the theatre feeling dumb. I didn’t feel that way at Women of Will, I did at The Theatre Company at Hubbard Hall’s production of A.R. Gurney’s Another Antigone. Tina Packer was telling me why she loved Shakespeare and I should too. Gurney was telling me that he went to Andover and Williams and Yale and spoke and read both Latin and Ancient Greek and I didn’t.
Granted, Gurney shares his own love and delight in the classics clearly through the character of Henry Harper, professor of classical literature at “a University in Boston” (are you sure it isn’t in Cambridge, Mr. Gurney?), who is played to perfection here by Philip Kerr, who also directed. But while I believed that Harper loved the classics and was able to instill that love in some of his students, I wasn’t taking one of his courses and neither was anyone else in the audience.
I don’t know how universal my experience is, but as a late Baby Boomer the place of classical language and literature were changing in the American educational world. Once considered mandatory for any educated individual, they were being moved into the realm of elective courses as I reached high school and college. I did have a year of Latin (taught by a sadly inebriated old maid who didn’t stay quite drunk enough to blot from her mind the reality that she had wasted her life teaching Latin to silly school girls) and of course read major works like the Iliad and the Odyssey and many of the plays, including Sophocles’ Theban cycle, in English*. But the classics as Gurney and his Professor Harper know and love them were no longer considered central.
Since the classics have not made a big revival in American education in the intervening decades (I’m sure they’re not on the MCAS or the Regents) it is safe to assume that the majority of the audience was in the same sad state of ignorance as I was.
So, quick refresher: Antigone was Oedipus’ daughter. Her two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, have killed each other in a battle over the throne of Thebes. Antigone is engaged to Haemon whose father, Creon, has ascended the throne and declared that while Eteocles shall be buried with all honor and ceremony, Polyneices’ body will be left as carrion on the battlefield. Antigone defies’ Creon’s orders and buries her brother’s body, incurring the death penalty.
This is Greek tragedy, so you will not be surprised to learn that just about everyone ends up dead, except Creon, who exiles himself. Gurney, through Harper, explains this as a fate worse than death to the community-centered Greeks.
This is the story as told by Sophocles in his tragedy Antigone written circa 442 BCE. “Another Antigone” opens with one of Harper’s students, Judy Miller (Erin Cousins), an ambitious senior who has already secured a position in a prestigious Wall Street training program in investment banking, presenting him with the script of her modern-day version of Antigone in lieu of her assigned term paper. Harper rejects it. Judy refuses to write the paper, insisting that her script is a scholarly effort that meets the requirements. Harper refuses to give her a passing grade without one. Without a passing grade she will not graduate and if she doesn’t graduate she loses her entrée to Wall Street. The battle of wills ensues, with Judy cast as Antigone and Harper as the inflexible Creon.
Gurney has conflated the roles of Haemon and Antigone’s sister, Ismene, into Judy’s soul mate, Dave Appleton (Jason Dolmetsch), a fellow senior feebly majoring in chemistry although his lack of ambition and interest make it obvious that it isn’t his life’s calling. Acting as the Chorus is Diana Eberhart (Sarah-Jane Gwillim), the University’s Dean of Humane Studies.
Judy decides to produce her Antigone and take her complaint against Harper to the University’s Grievance Committee. She enlists Dave to play the male lead and Dean Eberhardt to represent her before the committee. Her battle against the establishment consumes her whole being and radically alters her sense of self and perception of the world. While no blood is spilled (this is an A.R. Gurney play, after all) , at the end there is no doubt that the old Judy Miller is “dead.”
Harper does not undergo as complete a metamorphosis as Judy does, but he does come to see the error of his ways and vanishes. Whether he is dead or alive when the curtain falls is left a mystery, but that he has suffered that fate worse than death and been exiled from his community is indubitable.
The changes Dave goes through are far less plausible, and if Dolmetsch didn’t play him as such a gosh-darned likable fellow it would be evident that his is the most poorly drawn character on stage. I am not claiming that Dave Appleton is the first person to ever get within spitting distance of a degree in X and then realize that his first love was Y all along, I am saying that it is implausible that a lack-luster chemistry major who learned an affection for classical literature at his grandfather’s knee could suddenly, in his spare time, write the most brilliant paper on Antigone that Professor Harper has ever seen in all his many decades of teaching.
Dean Eberhardt alone remains unchanged by the events of the play. Whether this is because she has already reached her Nirvana or because she is stuck and cannot move I am not sure.
It would be hard to imagine a better cast. Kerr, as I have mentioned, is perfection. Gurney has a lot to say about academia (he taught in the Humanities department at MIT) and Kerr, who is himself a Harvard graduate and the Claribel Baird Halstead Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, knows exactly who Henry Harper is. If you ever went to college, you will too.
The cast renders each character as likeable, intelligent, and sympathetic, even Cousins’ combative Judy helps us understand her humanity and youthful passions. Dolmetsch doesn’t succeed in rendering two-dimensional character in 3-D, but you genuinely like his Dave and cheer for him to follow his heart.
Like Kerr, Gwillin nails the type of female academic administrator to a T. Once again, if you went to college, you will recognize Dean Eberhart. No one is credited with the costume design, but the clothing goes a long way towards helping to define each character, and, in Judy’s case, her emotional evolution.
There is an aspect of the play that I haven’t mentioned, and that is the vague and then specific accusations of anti-Semitism leveled against Professor Harper. Judy is Jewish and Dean Eberhard tells us she is Jewish on her mother’s side. Harper likes to compare and contrast the ancient Greek and Hebrew civilizations and writings in his lectures. Because he is a classicist, as opposed to a Hebraic scholar or a theologian, he likes the Greeks better. That’s his job.
When Judy is told of the complaints about Harper being an anti-Semite, which doesn’t occur until halfway into the play, her Jewish identity suddenly springs to the fore. Not her Jewish faith, but her place as a part of an historically persecuted people. The battle of wills between her and Harper suddenly becomes a matter of religious persecution.
Religion plays an important role in Sophocles’ play – Creon wants to prevent Antigone from performing a religious rite, which begs the question of who is angering the gods more – him for placing himself above the proscribed state religion or her for defying the state itself. But 20th century American academia (the play is set in “the present” but the technological references make it clear that that present is the late 1980’s when Gurney wrote the play) is scrupulously free of religion. From my point of view, the religious aspect of “Another Antigone” is discomforting, although it does allow for some eerily timely remarks about the United States’ relationship with Israel. Professor Harper and Helen Thomas would obviously have much to talk about.
Again, no one is credited with the set design, so I assume Kerr took the helm there as well. Turning the space in the Freight Depot Theater on its side to bring actors and audience in very close proximity. Four faceless life-sized soft-sculpture figures sit on the shallow steps along the back side of the playing space, and a bench, a desk, chair, and file cabinet, and a podium create separate spaces for students, faculty, an administration to perform.
My two complaints about this production are Peter J. Carrolan’s obnoxiously obvious lighting design, and the fact that this play was performed without an intermission. Gurney’s stage directions call for the show to be performed non-stop, as Sophocles’ Antigone was, but he does indicate where an intermission can be inserted if one is deemed necessary. According to my rear-end, an intermission was definitely necessary. An hour and forty-five minutes is too long a stretch to sit on those chairs. I spent the last 15-20 minutes praying that the next scene would be the final one, which is unfortunate because I was enjoying the play and the performances very much. If I had been given an intermission I would have been able to focus more on the play’s conclusion than on my own discomfort.
If you are a classicist and read or speak Latin and Ancient Greek, I imagine this play will fascinate you. If you are moderately ignorant, like me, you will still get a lot out of it. But if you can’t pronounce Antigone, you’d better stay home.
The Theatre Company at Hubbard Hall‘s production of “Another Antigone” will be performed June 10 (Pay What You Will / Open Rehearsal) at 8 p.m., June 11, 12, 18, 19, 25, 26 at 8 p.m., and June 13, 20, 27 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 for Hubbard Hall members, $24 for non-members and $15 for students and children. Tickets may be reserved and purchased by calling (518) 677-2495
The show runs 105 minutes with no intermission and is too intellectually dense to be of interest to children under 14. However if you have a teen studying Sophocles, this would be a perfect show to take them to.
Hubbard Hall is an historic opera house located at 25 E. Main St. in Cambridge, NY. For information, visit www.hubbardhall.org
*Ironically, we were assigned to write our own Greek tragedies after reading Sophocles in school, and my effort, based on the Greek myth of Zeus’ ultimate overthrow of his father, Cronus, was deemed highly unsatisfactory, resulting in a tussle with my teacher. Apparently dramatizing a story that was both Greek and tragic did not a Greek tragedy make. Go figure!