Theater review by Adam Feldman
In times of tyranny, there can also be resistance, and in times of resistance, there is always Antigone. The title character of Sophocles’s ancient tragedy refuses to accept a decree by her uncle Creon, the king of Thebes, that the corpse of her rebellious brother should be left unburied for beasts to devour; and the unbending Creon, who thinks the young lady protests too much, confines her to die in a cave. This mythic tale continues to resonate, and it has now inspired two concurrent Off Broadway adaptations. The first of them, imported by the Shed after premiering at London's National Theatre, is Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place; the other play is Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), which hits the Public later this month.
Like Robert Icke in Oedipus and Simon Stone in Medea, writer-director Zeldin squeezes the old story into a mold of contemporary psychodrama. Creon is now Chris (Tobias Menzies), who has been working with his new wife, Erica (Lorna Brown), to renovate his late brother’s house; they have opened up the living room by knocking down one wall and installing sliding glass doors in another, filling a symbolically dark and secretive space with equally symbolic sunlight. He also plans to disperse his brother’s crematory ashes outdoors—a plan that does not sit well with his niece Annie (House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy), a bisexual drifter who has gone off the grid and, apparently, her meds. Although Annie’s dad has been dead for years, she insists that he stay inurned in his old home. “They can’t scatter him, he’ll be gone,” she complains; and she is, if nothing else, anti-gone.
The Other Place | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
But is she Antigone? This is where The Other Place runs up against bearing walls that aren’t so easy to displace. Some of Zeldin’s changes are simple enough: Antigone’s sister, Ismene, is now named Issy (Ruby Stokes) but remains her closest ally in the family; creepster neighbor Tez (Jerry Killick) may have little else in common with the blind seer Tiresias, but he still has a knack for augury. (“I’ll tell you, there’s some bad juju around. I was down at Al Shami’s and the birds were fighting each other to get to the chips.”) Others are more oblique—I’m not sure what Erica’s child Leni (Lee Braithwaite) is doing in the play aside from filling it out—and most changes are harmless. Cremains instead of a body and a pup tent instead of a cave? Okay. Genetic predisposition in lieu of a curse? Sure. Antigone in baggy clothes, an enormous backpack and the haircut of a Teen Beat pin-up boy in the 1990s? Why not.
The Other Place | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
Yet The Other Place, like many other attempts to modernize the Greeks, has a hole where the ancient gods, fates and rituals should be. Compared to Antigone’s insistence on honoring the dead, Annie’s protest has risibly low stakes; just as an Oedipus without oracles is reduced to the story of a preposterously unlikely and monstrous bummer, Antigone without deeply rooted righteous principles is just the story of a mentally ill woman who can’t give up her father’s ghost. Compensatorily, Zeldin fills out the story with a theme of sexual transgression that emerges too suddenly to deliver the neomythic familial drama of, say, A View from the Bridge, and whose denouement is triggered by a stage convention—the coupling of an implausible indiscretion and an inopportune entrance—that is less classical than cliché.
The Other Place | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
If the text sometimes falters, though, the staging keeps its footing. Zeldin plays adaptly with the tension between naturalism and formality; the actors are often placed at a distance from one another on Rosanna Vize’s set, holding long dramatic poses like statues in a garden. Aggressively loud, rather insectoid music by Yannis Philippakis is piped in between the scenes—as if to say, “Wake up!”—but it’s the intensity of the performances that keeps you hooked through the 80-minute running time. D’Arcy and Menzies end the play in tears, and while I can’t say the same, I admire that they get to that place.
The Other Place. The Shed (Off Broadway). By Alexander Zeldin. Directed by Zeldin. With Emma D’Arcy, Tobias Menzies, Lorna Brown, Ruby Stokes, Jerry Killick, Lee Braithwaite. Running time: 1hr 20mins. No intermission.
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The Other Place | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
