The Santa Barbara City College Theatre Arts Department will offer a video streaming, student showcase production of Sophocles’ “Antigone” (431 BC), in a new translation by Paul Woodruff, directed by R. Michael Gros, Nov. 14-30.
The cast of “Antigone” includes Nathalie Aiello, Henry Alper, Liz Gates, Filip James Hanasz, Audrey Johnson, Jean Dedieu, Colby Noakes, Drewes McFarling, Stuart Orenstein, Ian Overton, Sue Smiley, Odalis Soriano, JP Stamoulis, Lydia Strack, Lizzy Urwick, Ida Wadman, Tyler Witucki and Estella Ye.
Necessity, as always, being the mother of invention (which is why I used to call Frank Zappa‘s first bandThe Necessities), “Antigone” will come to us in a new and unusual format, with video performances by participating actors all over the world.
The SBCC production was created “with a visual presentation style inspired by design elements of a graphic novel. The cast will have their live performances recorded and integrated into the very specific, visually energetic storytelling style of the graphic novel.”
Dubious as I am about the purely literary value of graphic novels (less than zero, I think), I am often struck by their visual power — the power of archetypes, legends and myths. It could be a very good fit with Greek drama, which is stylized to a degree.
[Curiously, however, what would seem to be the most stylized elements of all — the masks — were realistic portrayals of real faces. For example, Aristophanes (445-388 BC) poked some rough fun at the philosopher Socrates (ca 470-399 BC), in his comedy, “The Clouds” (423 BC). During one performance, several audience members shouted out that the Socrates mask bore no resemblance to the original, whereupon Socrates himself, who was sitting in the front row, stood up and showed his face to the protesters so they could see that the mask was, indeed, a faithful portrait of him (honesty, not vanity, being always his lodestar).]
“Antigone,” one of the most frequently performed of all Greek tragedies, is the third and final play of Sophocles’s so-called “Theban Trilogy,” which consists of I-“Oedipus Tyrannus” (429 BC) (better known by its Latin title, “Oedipus Rex;” II-“Oedipus at Colonus” (ca407 BC); and III-“Antigone.”
I say “so-called” because there is no evidence Sophocles intended the three plays to be taken as a unit. Although the events in the plays occur in the order listed above, “Antigone” was written (and performed) first, then “Oedipus Tyrannus,” and then, 25 years later, “Oedipus at Colonus.”
Moreover, each play is self-contained; its significance derives internally, rather than from its place in a sequence.
If “Antigone” is a sequel, it is certainly not to a play Sophocles wouldn’t write for a quarter of a century, but to the play “Seven Against Thebes” (467 BC) by the greatest [my opinion] Greek dramatist, Aeschylus (ca525-455 BC), of which the final scene sets up the immediate premise of the first scene of “Antigone.”
Indeed, so popular did “Antigone” prove that, nearly 50 years after it won First Prize at the Athenian Dionysia, the last scene of “Seven Against Thebes” was rewritten to make it line up even more exactly with the opening of Sophocles’s play.
Aeschylus’s tragedy is itself the last play of a Theban trilogy, sometimes called “The Oedipodea,” the first two plays of which, “Laius” and “Oedipus,” are lost.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Every single Greek tragedy is a working out of something that happened before the play begins, either in the previous play, or in the lives of the characters (but not at the beginning of Time, as in the Calvinist concept of predestination: “This act’s immutably decreed,” Ahab tells Starbuck, “It was rehearsed by thee and me a thousand centuries before this ocean rolled.”)
Antigone’s story begins with the birth of her father Oedipus, and his father’s decision, based on a prophecy, to expose his son to the elements in hopes he will die and thus be unable to fulfill the prophecy. But Baby Oedipus was found and raised by a sweet rustic couple.
Fast-forward some 20 years to young Oedipus walking along the road to Thebes. He meets an older man, who immediately begins to insult him. They fight, and Oedipus kills the man. Following the road into Thebes, he learns the man he killed was Laius, ruler of the polis.
Oedipus takes his place, in every sense, taking command of the Theban city-state (polis) and marrying Laius’s widow Jocasta, who has four children by him: two sons Eteocles and Polynices, and two daughters Ismene and Antigone.
All goes well for quite a few years, Oedipus ruling justly and wisely. Suddenly, the gods send a plague to Thebes, a punishment for a an act of hubris (violence against the gods), which must be brought to light and expiated to lift the curse.
Becoming a detective, Oedipus does a nifty job of tracking down the crime — the only problem is: he is the criminal.
The man he killed on the road was his father, and the widow he married was his mother. (“He loved his mother like no other,” sang Tom Lehrer, “His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.”)
Understandably, Oedipus wigs out, blinds himself with a piece of his wife’s jewelry (“How do you like my broach?” asks Jocasta, in Jean Cocteau’s “Oedipus Rex.” “My dear,” says Oedipus, “it’s positively blinding!”), and leaves Thebes to wander the world, led and cared-for by Ismene and Antigone.
Ultimately, Oedipus dies, though it would seem he has managed to satisfy the gods with the depth and sincerity of his repentance. (“The Wandering Jew” and “King Lear” both partake of this section of the narrative.)
Meanwhile, back in Thebes, Oedipus’ sons Eteocles and Polynices have made a deal to rule the city in alternating years, Eteocles taking the first year. At the end of the year, however, Eteocles refuses to step down, which triggers a civil war. Polynices raises an army and leads it against Thebes, while Eteocles commands the defending forces.
The city repels the attack, but, like Wolfe and Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, both commanders are killed, with Eteocles and Polynices killing each other in hand-to-hand combat.
In the original final scene of “Seven Against Thebes,” the bodies of Eteocles and Polynices are brought on stage and placed side by side for public mourning. Curtain.
In the revised, Sophocles friendly ending, a messenger appears, announcing a prohibition against burying Polynices, the rebel, and his sister, Antigone, announces her intention to defy this edict. The prohibition was ordered by Creon, Jocasta’s brother and uncle of Oedipus’s four children, who has become regent of Thebes.
Creon’s edict, and Antigone’s determination to defy it, are the “something[s] that happen before” the first scene of “Antigone,” and which drive the action of the play.
Antigone is the heroine of the play that bears her name, but she is not the protagonist.
Women had limited roles to play in Athenian society (all the Greek dramatists worked in Athens, wherever they were born): wife, mother, daughter, sister — all excluded from public life — and their roles in tragedy were even more circumscribed: adulteress or sacrificial victim/martyr.
Antigone, dutiful daughter and sister, has already chosen to bury her brother, in defiance of Creon, before her play begins, and she never wavers. In fact, she would doubtless insist that, according to her society’s moral value system, she had no choice:
The alternative was to obey Creon and let her brother rot unpurified, placing an indelible stain on her family’s honor. Unacceptable. By her lights, she was not free to do otherwise.
According to the American critic and scholar, Brander Matthews, drama is possible “only when the central figure is master of his fate and captain of his soul. Action in the drama is thus seen to be not mere movement or external agitation; it is the expression of a will which knows itself.”
The only character in the play who fits Matthews’s definition is Creon. He is the protagonist of “Antigone.” His edict may make a justified political statement, but it remains a moral outrage.
Some might wish to discover feminist themes in “Antigone,” but far from championing women’s rights and their liberation from the chains of patriarchy, she has little or no personality independent of her society. If she must die, it will be to keep all the patriarchal rules in place. She is not a modern woman.
It was the comedian Aristophanes who acknowledged the power — at least collectively — of women. In his anti-war play “Lysistrata” (413 BC), he has the women of Athens go on a sex strike, refusing to have sex with their husbands, until they bring the Peloponnesian War to an end.
Perhaps for the first time, though certainly not the last, a war started by men had the utterly unintended and unforeseen consequence of advancing women somewhat on their long road to equality.
Since human nature doesn’t change much, if at all, Greek drama will always be relevant, no matter the society in which it is presented. It is up to the theater company to make it, in the best sense, entertaining. The SBCC Theater Group has solved this problem quite ingeniously, it seems to me.
Tickets for the on-demand, video streaming are $15 general; $10 seniors and SBCC staff; $5 students per household; and can be purchased by calling 805-965-5935, or by visiting the Theatre Group website www.theatregroupsbcc.com.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.