The timeless Antigone was first produced around 441 BCE. Its author presented it at the Dionysia Festival, a special community event in honor of the god, Dionysus. Thousands flocked to the amphitheater, and Antigone was well-received, winning a first prize and even contributing to the playwright’s election to a military general post. Professor Aubrey Deeker Hernandez, the director of this production, describes the composition as “a political thriller.” This ancient yet vivid story remains both politically and culturally relevant.

The play’s author, the talented Greek tragedian, Sophocles, was born around 496 BCE, in Colonus, a small village near Athens. As an Athenian citizen, Sophocles received an exceptional education and was involved in various political and military affairs — even contributing successful leadership during the Peloponnesian War. During his long life, Sophocles significantly updated productions of Greek tragedies by improving costumes and decorations, extending the number of players in a cast, and thoughtfully adjusting dialogue. Also, when he wrote Antigone, Sophocles would have understood the rancorous Athenian and Theban rivalry. Civil war often seemed imminent. Such concerns certainly resonate with current world events, of course, and this production does not offer a period piece. Rather, here we find ourselves, uncomfortably, in a familiar world that feels both immediate and contemporary.

But Antigone is a family story, featuring the downfall of a long and doomed dynasty, as well. Today, this work offers the last chapter in what we might presume was a planned trilogy — though the three works were actually independently created, written decades apart — in a non-sequential order, and never meant to be performed together. The first play, Oedipus Rex, won second prize at the Dioynsia in the mid-420s BCE, while the middle story, Oedipus at Colonus, was written last and was produced in 401 BCE, five years after the Sophocles’s death. Oedipus Rex features the now very familiar story of how the title character fulfilled the dire prediction of killing his own father and marrying his mother, Jocasta, the woman with whom he would bear four children: Polynices, Eteocles, Ismene, and Antigone. Once he recognizes his crimes, Oedipus blinds himself then resigns himself to his banishment from Thebes. In contrast, Oedipus at Colonus, offers insights into how the tragic hero’s pastoral exile leads to spiritual transformation. Additionally, the twenty years of isolated caregiving, provided by dutiful daughter, Antigone, most likely contributed not only to the father’s longevity and redemption but also to the daughter’s determined mindset when we meet her in the play that bears her name.

During other key moments of Oedipus at Colonus, however, Oedipus spurns his son, Polynices, when he requests help in his battle with his brother, Eteocles, for the Theban throne. The father has felt betrayed by family members who never visited during his decades of isolation. In fact, after Oedipus fled, the city fell under the regent control of Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law/uncle. As Oedipus’s male heirs came of age, though, they forged a plan for sharing the throne, alternating yearly. This succession design was meant to provide a periodic and peaceful transition of power, but Eteocles would not relinquish his position as agreed. Polynices departed and then led the seven champions of Argos in efforts to force his brother to honor the original pact. Seven Against Thebes, a play written by another ancient and lauded Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, actually follows the brothers’ mortal conflict and their fulfillment of their father’s vengeful curse upon them. 

This production of Antigone chooses to open with these visceral moments, to help the audience to understand key events that immediately precede and inform Antigone and how the effects of pervasive and persistent war linger in the Theban community. The double fratricide thus provides our entrée into Sophocles’s Antigone, where Creon has designated Polynices as a traitor. Eteocles will receive a warrior’s sacred burial rites, while Polynices will receive no burial at all — thus establishing the central conflict of this play. Antigone vows to break man’s law to follow the gods’ law as well as her own conscience and the plain and primal compulsion to honor her defamed, dead brother.

Oedipus's legacy, that original sin and great primary wound, towers over Antigone, haunts the citizens of Thebes, and is constantly mentioned by the story’s characters. The setting presents a traumatized society, a city that has been brutalized by plague, scandal, national humiliation, grief --and now war. The city is desperate to heal. Clearly, the sins of the fathers are visited upon their progeny, and the very social order now requires cleansing. Antigone’s ultimate sacrifice will also herald other painful losses. Meanwhile, the story consistently asks audiences to consider both the power of fate and the human effort to muster and exact agency in a confusing world. Classically tragic, Antigone will defend her moral high ground even as her pride and commitment mirror her Uncle Creon’s obstinate dedication to state law and absolute order. 

This production of Antigone considers how conflicts, such as the individual vs. the state, moral law vs. state law, and desire vs. duty — as well as themes of divided loyalties, civil disobedience, gender and power, propaganda and superstition, and the plight of the underdog, all intensify in the periwinkle half-light of moral dilemmas and the sonorous drone of rigid dogma. This muscular, fast, and relentless production shows us how quickly the world can evolve, with unapologetic drive, when the corpse of a political enemy is left to rot as food for scavenging dogs and birds of prey. Here, we join the cold and sterile war room of suffocating, authoritative power and recognize how crumbling blocks of concrete uniformity can silence our more natural voices of human compassion. Evil can prevail when good people try nothing. And so, even today, Antigone remains the story of a rebel, a brave woman who defies a brutal establishment while also fulfilling her family’s destiny.