Spring Break
Antigone sours with oddities despite talented chorus
Issue date: 11/1/07
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To see what the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's present production of Bertolt Brecht's Antigone is driving at, it is almost obligatory to work through a maze of temporal displacements. The canonical status of Sophocles' fifth-century B.C. drama didn't prevent Brecht from producing an adaptation of the Greek tragedy in 1948. His version reaches the Festival's audience in a 1967 translation by Judith Malina, which returning BSF director Raine Bode has in turn fitted with costumes and scenery meant to recall the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Still, a play preoccupied with the spoils of conquest and the dangers of obedience can't help evoking the war currently raging in Iraq. In all likelihood, as the latest entry in the Festival's current "Season of Defiance," Brecht's state-and-society tragedy may have been intended to do precisely that.
It turns out that organizing something by Brecht is a fairly effective way to tap into the zeitgeist. A summer 2005 staging of the playwright's Life of Galileo at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, for instance, coincided nicely with the year's debates over intelligent design - which, like that script itself, pitted cultural creed against hard scientific fact. But an odd sense of timeliness can't always hide the flaws in Brecht's playwriting. Characters like his Antigone - at once transparent and eloquent - reward their spectators with knockout deliveries, though they also invite passages of glaring awkwardness. Bode seems deeply appreciative of the chosen script. Perhaps that's why this Antigone can't help reaching Brecht's dramatic highs along with a few embarrassing lows.
As the drama opens, the trials, horrors and losses of war remain fresh in the memory of Antigone (Christine Demuth), a Theban maiden who has lost her two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. The body of the treasonous Polyneices is to be left to the vultures as a warning to potential malcontents. Though this edict is brutally enforced by King Kreon (Stephen Patrick Martin), neither his threats nor the pleadings of Antigone's sister Ismene (Tara Bradway) deter the heroine from attempting her reviled sibling's last rites.
It turns out that organizing something by Brecht is a fairly effective way to tap into the zeitgeist. A summer 2005 staging of the playwright's Life of Galileo at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, for instance, coincided nicely with the year's debates over intelligent design - which, like that script itself, pitted cultural creed against hard scientific fact. But an odd sense of timeliness can't always hide the flaws in Brecht's playwriting. Characters like his Antigone - at once transparent and eloquent - reward their spectators with knockout deliveries, though they also invite passages of glaring awkwardness. Bode seems deeply appreciative of the chosen script. Perhaps that's why this Antigone can't help reaching Brecht's dramatic highs along with a few embarrassing lows.
As the drama opens, the trials, horrors and losses of war remain fresh in the memory of Antigone (Christine Demuth), a Theban maiden who has lost her two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. The body of the treasonous Polyneices is to be left to the vultures as a warning to potential malcontents. Though this edict is brutally enforced by King Kreon (Stephen Patrick Martin), neither his threats nor the pleadings of Antigone's sister Ismene (Tara Bradway) deter the heroine from attempting her reviled sibling's last rites.
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