Off-Broadway Reviews: Antigone (This Play I Read in High School); Marcel on the Train

Celia Keenan-Bolger and Susannah Perkins
in Antigone (This Play I Read in High School).
Credit: Joan Marcus

There have been numerous attempts at updating Greek tragedy. This season alone the tale of Oedipus has seen a new modern version from Robert Icke and a revival of the gospel musical adaptation. Anna Ziegler has taken on the shattering narrative of Oedipus’ equally benighted daughter Antigone in a searing retelling through a modern lens. Subtitled (This Play I Read in High School), this Antigone is still a devastating portrait of female defiance of male oppression but goes several steps further. 

In Sophocles’ original, Antigone is condemned to death for giving her brother a decent burial in defiance of the king, her uncle Creon who wants the body to be left to the vultures for political reasons. In Ziegler’s skillful melding of myth and modern issues, the heroine is to be killed by the state for having an abortion. This is a chillingly relevant adjustment since so many states have made such an operation illegal since the overturning of Roe V. Wade and some have gone so far as to equate abortion with homicide, punishable by lengthy prison sentences. (The state of Tennessee just unsuccessfully attempted to make execution the penalty.) How many Antigones are there in America today?

Ziegler answers that query by combining a contemporary woman’s story with a version of the original that takes place simultaneously in the past and the present. Celia Keenan-Bolger compassionately plays the Chorus who interweaves her 2026 story of an unwanted pregnancy with Antigone’s tale after meeting a punky, self-possessed teenager (the magnificently spiky Susannah Perkins) who happens to reading the play across the aisle from her on an airplane. We then travel to a Thebes not unlike our contemporary society where the new king Creon (a searingly self-doubting Tony Shalhoub) strives to bring rigid order to the moral chaos left behind by his predecessor Oedipus, who had unwittingly married his own mother. 

B'way Update: Cast for Mother Play; Death Becomes Her

Jessica Lange will star in
Paula Vogel's Mother Play.

Casting and dates have been announced for Mother Play by Paula Vogel (Indecent, How I Learned to Drive) to open this coming spring at Second Stage's Hayes Theater. Tony and Drama Desk winner Celia Keenan-Bolger (To Kill a Mockingbird), Oscar, Emmy and Tony winner Jessica Lange (Long Day's Journey Into Night), and Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG winner Jim Parsons (Big Bang Theory) will star in the world premiere directed by Tony nominee and Drama Desk winner Tina Landau (SpongeBob SquarePants the Musical). Previews begin April 2 with an April 25 opening. 

Lange will play Phyllis, a domineering matriarch supervising the move of her teenaged children Carl (Parsons) and Martha (Keenan-Bolger) into a new apartment outside Washington, DC in 1962. Phyllis has definite ideas about how her children should lead their lives. The play follows the family's rollercoaster ride through the coming years. 

In other news, Megan Hilty (Smash) and Jennifer Simard (Disaster, Once Upon a One More Time) will star in a musical version of the 1992 film comedy Death Becomes Her which starred Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, set to play Chicago's Cadillac Theater from April 30-June 2, 2024. The new musical, which has its sights set on Broadway, features a score by Noel Carey and Julia Mattison, book by Marco Pennette and direction by Christopher Gattelli (Newsies). Simard plays Helen, a writer whose husband has an affair with her former friend Madeline (Hilty), a glamorous movie star. As Helen plots her revenge against Madeline, the stakes becomes higher when both partake of a mysterious potion granting them eternal youth and beauty. 

Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in
Death Becomes Her.

2018-19 Tony and Drama Desk Predictions

Eva Noblezada, Andre De Shields and Reeve Carney in Hadestown
Credit: Matthew Murphy

Once again the Tonys (presented June 9) and Drama Desk Awards (given June 2) will have significantly different results. In previous seasons, the two accolade-dispensing organizations would honor almost the same recipients and the DDs were seen as a theatrical equivalent to the Golden Globes with the Tonys playing Oscars. The essential difference between the two prizes is the Tonys, given out by the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League, are only for Broadway shows while the Drama Desk, composed of New York-based theater critics, journalists and editors, includes on, Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions in their celebration of the best of Gotham stages. Because of this discrepancy, if a show moves from Off-Broadway to Broadway in separate seasons, it would be up for a Tony but ineligible for a DD award since it was in contention previously.

This year, the prime example is Hadestown which played Off-Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop in 2016, had a London staging and now is at the Walter Kerr. The Outer Critics Circle, which gives out separate awards for Outstanding Play and Musical for on and Off-Broadway and considers both for everything else, judged the modern adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth different enough to be under consideration in all categories, winning Broadway Musical, Score, Director of a Musical and Featured Actor and Actress. The Drama Desk has deemed Hadestown eligible only in categories which feature new work for the Broadway production, so new cast members, Rachel Chavkin's direction and design elements are eligible, but not Anais Mitchell's score and book. The New York Drama Critics Circle membership was divided on the question of the show's eligibility and had a vote by email to determine its status. The result was a tie and Hadestown was deemed ineligible.