Blood Line: The Oedipus/Antigone Story
TinFish Productions
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But Sophocles–the exemplar of tragic poets in Aristotle’s estimation–thrusts the modern viewer into a world as alien as anything George Lucas ever dreamed up. Bizarre prophecies govern the action in Oedipus the King: Oedipus will kill his father, marry his mother, and lose his kingdom, all thanks to his father’s past indiscretion. Trying to enter this deterministic universe, where there’s no getting around the oracle, can be like trying to fit into your favorite childhood sweater. His Antigone–in which the title character must defy Creon and bury her traitorous brother, Polyneices, as the gods decree–entails the belief that god-given edicts are inviolate and bring destruction upon those who defy them, an idea that seems outlandish in 20th-century America.
To bring Sophocles into the realm of relevance, Thirteenth Tribe begins with Nicholas Rudall’s blunt, bare-bones translations of Oedipus the King and Antigone, performed back-to-back as a single story even though the plays were written many years apart. As he did in his translations of Euripides’ Iphigenia plays for director JoAnne Akalaitis at the Court Theatre, Rudall eschews poetic adornment in favor of simple, declarative sentences. His text is as much paraphrase as translation–“Sophocles for Dummies,” some might argue. But as Joanna Settle’s staging reveals, Rudall’s almost vernacular script allows modern actors to find some immediacy in ancient dramas.
This emotional indulgence is simply out of place in Oedipus–after all, he’s supposed to be a man of extraordinary intellectual abilities, none of which ever surface in this production. The same self-indulgence completely overwhelms Creon in Antigone, keeping the play from ever getting off the ground. Hegel called Sophocles’ tragedy “a struggle between right and right”: it represents the clash between Creon’s duty to the state and Antigone’s duty to her family. But while Antigone is merely a bit full of herself here, Creon (Mark Ulrich) is a paranoid lunatic, howling, squawking, and ranting from his first appearance. And since he’s completely wrong and Antigone is absolutely right, the audience has no ethical struggle to work through for the play’s 90 minutes.
