Wilma's 'Antigone': Ancient play, modern interpretation

A white circle on the black stage marks the places for the 12 actors - 10 men, two women - who are the cast of Sophocles' Antigone, the classic tragedy that will launch both the Wilma's new season and the actor-centric Wilma Hothouse project-development program this week.

The actors are barefoot, milling around, expectant. At 10 a.m., on the dot, the famed director of Greece's Attis Theatre, Theodoros Terzopoulos, pads in in his socks and claps his hands. Silence falls, and a grueling hour of exercise begins.

What appears at first to be a basic stretching routine turns out to be a precision technique. Every muscle, every finger, every breath, is made stronger and stronger, and each exercise will be transformed into a theatrical gesture laden with meaning in this radical production of this ancient play. The actors' familiarity with their own bodies and with one another's bodies is crucial to the idea of cast as collective.

This is a highly stylized production, created as much by Terzopoulos' images as he sculpts the human clay of these thrilling actors as it is by Sophocles. "Big emotion - not sentimentalism, but emotion. Big theater - to make tragedy, we need big form." To this end, he designs everything - the script adaptation, the lighting, choreography, costumes, and sets. At the end of each scene rehearsal, the actors sit on the floor, hanging on every word - his voice is a soft, raspy purr, heavily accented when he speaks English - as he gives them detailed notes. This happens many times a day, every day.

Tradition has it Sophocles was promoted to general - he commanded an expedition against Samos - on the strength of the play's success about 2,500 years ago. Although written before the two Oedipus plays, Antigone concludes the cycle's story.

It begins just after the civil war in Thebes: Oedipus' two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, have killed each other in a battle for the throne, and Creon, Oedipus' brother-in-law, is now king. He has decreed that Polyneices is the traitor and thus should remain unburied, left to the vultures and the dogs outside the city gates. Oedipus' daughter Antigone feels it is her duty to bury her brother, risking death by disobeying the royal order. Her sister, Ismene, is too frightened or too obedient to help her.

Once Antigone is caught by the soldiers guarding the body, we watch the net of the play's plot tangle and tighten: Creon is mad with power and his son Haemon, betrothed to Antigone, cannot change his father's mind, which is set on her death. Teiresias, the seer, finally persuades Creon to reconsider, but too late. The tragic lesson is always learned too late; if it were learned in the nick of time, it would be merely melodrama.

The clashes in Antigone are between the powerful and the powerless, a man and a woman, age and youth, secular law and religion, a government and a citizen; the play asks whether a person should obey her conscience or the laws of the land.

What makes questions interesting and difficult is that they are embedded in the ambiguity of character motivation: Is Antigone a martyr? An egoist? A political revolutionary? In love with death? In Antigone, as in most of the great ancient Greek tragedies, the subject is suffering. An individual heroically, hopelessly struggles against overwhelming forces.

Judging by the usually closed rehearsal I was privileged to watch, many of those questions are answered by Marianne McDonald's translation, chosen and adapted by Terzopoulos. Some is in modern Greek, some in ancient Greek, some in English. Some is sung, some is spoken.

When the Chorus (Brian T. Ratcliffe, Justin Jain, Jered McLenigan - who also plays the guard - Steven Richard, Stathis Grapsas, Ross Beschler) is silent, Terzopoulos wants their eyes wide open in horror, each mouth formed into an O - living masks of tragedy. This is, obviously, difficult to maintain as their throats and eyeballs dry out.

The director sculpts actors' voices as well as their bodies and faces: "Voice must come from deep down near the genital organs; if they speak here" - he gestures to the diaphragm - "they eliminate the low zones and get (comic high voice) blah blah blah. It is false, no energy, no air, no activated words, no passion. It is the discipline. An open body creates an open mind and an open spirit - if you are open, you can meet the other - not the god, but another person. But if you are closed, it is like prison."

And don't even get him started on actors who use microphones. He wants voices that can reach 15,000 people in an amphitheater, voices that "bring the conflicts like an earthquake to the people."

Paolo Musio, an Italian actor of major European reputation, plays the Leader of Chorus; he has the unnerving, uncanny ability to make his voice sound like many voices, and so seems to be playing the entire population of Thebes. It is a technique, Terzopoulos explains, based on speaking during both inhalation and exhalation.

Creon is played by Antonis Miriagos with wild-eyed, frantic gestures in what promises to be a hair-raising performance. Ed Swidey is the narrator; he stands to one side and "remembers" the events.

Antigone, the fierce Jennifer Kidwell, will astonish with her gorgeous singing voice - and wait until you hear what song Terzopoulos has chosen to ground the production in American culture. When she and Ismene, the lovely Sarah Gliko, greet each other for the first time, arms thrown wide, they create a spine-tingling moment.

And although this is image-based rather than language-based theater (remember Attis' stunning production of Ajax at the 2013 Fringe?), the words always matter; for instance, the famous first line of the first Ode usually reads, "Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man," while here it is, "but none more terrible than man."

When I ask Terzopoulos why he chose Antigone of all the tragedies, he replied, "It is very actual today. In our times we have many difficulties. The crisis is not only economic, but moral, ideological." He adds, "I am afraid for the world."

Toby Zinman reviews theater for The Inquirer.

StartText

Antigone

Previews Wednesday through Oct. 13, opens Oct. 14; runs through Nov. 8 at the Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.

Tickets: $10-$25.

Information: 215-546-7824 or www.wilmatheater.org.EndText