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. 

2018 Tony and Drama Desk Predictions

Just like last year the Tony and Drama Desk Awards are going to be very different. In 2017, Dear Evan Hansen and Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 dominated the Tonys, but were ineligible for the Drama Desks because they were in the running for 2016 because of their earlier Off-Broadway runs. The Tonys are only for Broadway shows and the Drama Desks include on and Off. Usually the DDs and Tonys results are pretty similar because the DD voters tend to go for Broadway shows. (The Tonys are voted on by 841 industry insiders including producers, directors, designers, actors, stage managers and a few critics who belong to the New York Drama Critics Circle, while the Drama Desks are voted on by about 100 theater reviewers, editors and reporters.) This year, The Band's Visit is the likely Tony champ, but it played Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre Company last season, taking home several 2017 DD Awards as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. In addition, several Broadway performers and creative personnel who received Tony love are absent from the DD list, particularly Lauren Ambrose and Norbert Leo Butz of My Fair Lady (the seven-member DD nominating committee didn't seem to like Bartlett Sher's Lincoln Center revival of the Lerner and Loewe classic.) Ambrose won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical for her scrappy Eliza Doolittle and Butz took the OCC Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his boisterous Alfred Doolittle. Harry Hadden-Patten's Henry Higgins is in the running for both a DD and a Tony.

Here are my predications for both awards. The Drama Desks will be presented on June 3 and the Tonys the following week on June 10.

Best Play
Tony: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two
Drama Desk: Admissions
Harry Potter isn't even nominated for the top DD play category. In fact, all of the DD outstanding play candidates are Off-Broadway shows. This will be one of the few times the DD award goes to a non-Broadway show. In the over 40 years since the Drama Desk began given out Best Play awards, they have only done it six times. The rare past exceptions are Tribes (2012), Ruined (2009), Wit (1999), How I Learned to Drive (1997), Marvin's Room (1992), and A Lie of the Mind (1986).