An interesting experiment is taking place at Perishable Theatre with the premiere of an independent production, tig, written by Ben Jolivet and directed by Nancy Hoffman (through June 22). It’s a contemporary adaptation of the Greek legend, most famously presented in Sophocles’s Antigone, aiming to make the story of duty and honor relevant to modern audiences.
Since hubris — arrogant pride — is a tragic flaw that’s celebrated in song and story these days, from American Idol to 24, the play should have a shot. It certainly catches our attention fast. As Polynices, Jeff Hodge runs out armed to the teeth, turning us into his prospective victims in a high school cafeteria, raging at us for our offenses to him.
Antigone, nicknamed Tig (Moira Brady), has talked her sister Ismene (Liz Gotauco) and boyfriend Haemon (Lucian Cohen) into cutting classes that day. Their world falls apart when they learn that more than 130 students, including Polynices’s twin brother Eteocles, were slaughtered by Polynices before he killed himself. The sisters’ guardian and Haemon’s father is Kreon (Michael A. LoCicero), the state governor, whose first concern is to keep this from becoming politically ruinous. He forbids the burial of Polynices; Tig is intent on burying him. This conflict and its complex motives are the story.
The acting all around is good, especially Hodge in flashback scenes as the pathologically needy Polynices as well as his mean twin, who wants to toughen him up for life with regular beatings. That sort of polar-opposite characterization is multiplied by Beth Hicks. She serves not really as a chorus, as billed, but rather as eight characters who come into the story, from a compassionate cop to a madwoman seer to an angry mother grieving over the death of her two children at the school. As for Tig, Brady has her cold-eyed earnestness down pat, but director Hoffman doesn’t have her show much emotional development, and that robs the second act of potential impact.
Turning poetry into prose isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not if it doesn’t diminish more than the language. The thing is, heightened language and rarefied sentiments aren’t just fancy decorations embellishing works like Antigone. They are tools that playwrights use to carve their way through the prosaic stuff of ordinary, troubled life. We more readily follow them as they, when successful, break through to illumination. Rubbing our eyes in that light is a staggering joy that allows every playwright to be our Prometheus, and makes every artist a god.
So tig is a worthy effort, a successful accomplishment in its own terms despite some scenes where exchanges spin their wheels far too long before gaining traction. It’s even a noble effort, making Antigone available to those who otherwise wouldn’t look twice at it. Yet while bringing Greek tragedy down to the level of 20something audiences might be a practical option in this culture, by definition something is lost.
What is gained? “Fuck you!” ends exchanges here too frequently to keep track of. That’s not for shock but rather for frustration value — after a while we get in phase with the characters’ cognitive impotence, the inability to communicate that also was behind the explosive, murderous opening. Maybe our collective curse of Sisyphus today is not to fail in rolling a rock up a hill but rather to fail in rolling thoughts off our tongues. And if our fragmented subcultures can’t be brought together by communicating, perhaps we can huddle for animal warmth and mutual empathy over that inability.
