Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I wish I could remember which of my playwriting friends said it. She was talking about the trend of contemporary writers engaging established works with adaptations, revisions, updates, intentional travesties and/or sequels. She connected it to the number of playwrights who went from their homes to college to graduate writing programs to getting produced. She claimed that after they wrote their first two semi-autobiographic plays, many writers with MFA degrees, lacking much experience in the real world to draw on, started thinking about the work they studied. This, she theorized, was the reason for the wave of plays derived from (among others) The Crucible, A Doll’s House, and Hamlet. (Of course, it’s not that new a phenomenon. Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead premiered in 1966.)

I grant you it’s a snippy observation and it’s dismissive of some very good work. For example, I thought Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain was a rare and stirring experience. Of course, it worked better for those who knew Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Surely, a key reason to reference an earlier work is to engage in a dialogue with it. Reading Percival Everett’s James without having read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn would mean missing much of the point of Everett’s book.

Which brings me to Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) by Ann Ziegler, which opened recently at the Public Theater. It’s narrated by a contemporary figure, and it’s written in colloquial language. On the upside, Susannah Perkins is a riveting Antigone and Tony Shalhoub a tortured Creon, and Ziegler gives them extended passages to engage each other.

But, yes, I had problems. Ziegler has reconfigured the story to center on abortion rights. This just doesn’t feel like an equivalent to Sophocles, in which Antigone incurs Creon’s wrath by choosing her religious obligation to family (specifically a brother who died defying Creon) over her obligation to the state. Also, the use of a contemporary narrator explicitly relating the story to her own circumstances struck me as interfering with the audience’s job to evaluate the action for themselves. I keep coming back to this idea: drama is not about stating ideas. It is about putting compelling behavior onstage and encouraging the audience to react with their own ideas. When a character stands onstage and starts informing us of what the writer thinks their own story means, the audience is rendered passive. If you want to editorialize, that’s what an essay is for.

There was more than enough in the evening to make me want to see Ziegler’s next play, and Perkins and Shalhoub were compelling in the passages that allowed them to be.