ANTIGONE (THIS PLAY I READ IN HIGH SCHOOL) Opens At The Public Theater

The Public Theater’s world premiere of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), by Anna Ziegler and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, opens tonight. The reviews are in for the starry production. See what the critics had to say in our roundup below!

A take on Sophocles’ classic, Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) reimagines the story of Oedipus’ daughter Antigone through a bold new lens. Written by award-winning playwright Anna Ziegler, this lyrical epic follows a fiercely independent young woman determined to control her own body in a kingdom ruled by archaic laws that regulate women’s autonomy. Incisively witty and breathtakingly intelligent, Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) paints a world that is both modern and ancient; a world of lost leaders, hapless cops, and one very righteous daughter on an all-night bender. Drama Desk Award nominee Tyne Rafaeli directs this daring new work about the timeless quest to find your voice.

The complete cast of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) includes Raquel Chavez (Understudy), Ethan Dubin (Cop 3/Achilles), Celia Keenan-Bolger (Chorus), Katie Kreisler (Cop 1/Proprietor), James Joseph O’Neil (Understudy), Susannah Perkins (Antigone), Dave Quay (Cop 2/Palace Guard), Kamal Sehrawy (Understudy), Tony Shalhoub (Creon), Calvin Leon Smith (Haemon), Ariel Woodiwiss (Understudy), and Haley Wong (Ismene).

The play recently extended through April 5.

Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal: Ms. Ziegler structures her play as a blend of the contemporary and the classical, with longer monologues alternating with dialogue. The director, Tyne Rafaeli, smoothly integrates the two styles, and the wonderful Ms. Keenan-Bolger, who has most of the choral duties, is excellent at finessing the longer passages (some of Dicey’s personal history could benefit from telescoping) so that they do not devolve into hollow speeches. That said, the central theme—of women’s powerlessness through the ages, even over their own bodies—gets a perhaps over-thorough workout.

Sara Holdren, Vulture: Given such a bleak view out our own windows, it’s bracing to see a playwright like Anna Ziegler take on one of the old tragedies with the most staying power. In Ziegler’s shudderingly intense Antigone (this play I read in high school), directed with assertive spareness by Tyne Rafaeli, a diffident present-day narrator named Dicey (Celia Keenan-Bolger) starts things off by admitting that she’s felt unable to shake the heroine of Sophocles’s play ever since tenth-grade English.

Billy McEntee, 1 Minute Critic: Playwright Anna Ziegler reimagines Antigone for today with good intentions and mixed results. Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) maintains Antigone’s defiant spirit by positioning her in today’s reproductive rights debates. Instead of burying her brother, this Antigone (an always dependable Susannah Perkins) has gotten an abortion. Across the centuries, one penalty persists: death.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: There are a lot of speeches in Ziegler’s play, many of them laced with a subversive contemporary wit and a bracing grip on what it means to give birth or not. Her “Antigone” doesn’t have the ghoulish fascination of the original; however, as depicted here, birth and abortion can be far more scary. The play ends with Keenan-Bolger and Perkins in a tight embrace, one that excludes men — even a good-guy like Smith’s Haemon. Men are mere bystanders here.

Kyle Turner, New York Theatre Guide: The turgid impulses of Ziegler’s writing — including a laughable line where Keenan-Bolger says, “[Antigone] taught me I was enough!” — sacrifice both Antigone’s and Perkins’s ability to display their shared insurgency, magnitude, and furious iconoclasm.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: Ziegler’s Antigone isn’t the same play you read in high school. It’s a far more urgent work that resurfaces one of Western literature’s first female revels, and gives her a new and vital sense of purpose.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Handled with proper care, this could be the basis of a compelling new vision of Antigone. But Ziegler’s play is, at times, quite bafflingly sloppy. Early on, for example, while providing “Antigone 101” background, Dicey says that Oedipus “was famously cursed to murder his father and sleep with his mother—which he did and then promptly killed himself.” But he didn’t kill himself, of course; famously, he blinded himself. Is this a deliberate howler, intended to make Dicey’s narration unreliable? It’s hard to tell, because so much of the rest of the show and Tyne Rafaeli’s direction of it at the Public are tonally chaotic.