AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL: III

STRATFORD, Conn.--What a whale of a tale is the story of Antigone! It was momentous and relevant 2500 years ago; it is momentous and relevant today; and, if civilization should happen to survive 2500 years more, it will doubtless be momentous and relevant still.

The tale was given its first great artistic shaping by Sophocles, whose dramatization remains the best known. Although his Antigone concludes the story presented in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colouns, it was written before the other two; it is, in fact, the next-to-earliest of his surviving works. Early or not, it is a supreme master-piece, fully deserving of the first prize that it copped; and it contains a higher proportion of lyric writing than any of his other works.

Burial, then Death

Now once again, thanks to the American Shakespeare Festival, we are able to witness the stunning story of Antigone, who, believing that the soul of an unburied body was condemned to restless wandering throughout eternity, defied the order of King Creon, her uncle, by scattering earth on the rotting corpse of her slain brother Polyneices, with the full knowledge that the penalty for so doing was death.

But the version currently on stage is not that of Sophocles; it is the modern one of Anouilh--who is, with Beckett, one of the two greatest play-wrights of our time in the French language. Anouilh did, however, work from the play of Sophocles, though the result can in no wise be called a translation. In fact, Anouilh's play contains only one line that is an exact rendering from Sophocles. Anouilh preserved the actual story intact, but subjected the entire affair to a deep and thorough rethinking. If he was unable to equal the lofty grandeur of the original, he nonetheless did create one of the supreme French plays of our century.

Anouilh has been criticized for daring to alter certain features of Sophocles' play. But he had every right to do so. After all, Sophocles' own version of the tale was far from the first, and contained its own innovations. Before Sophocles, Antigone was supported in her act by other young maidens; and she was defying, not Creon and his guards, but the corporate decree of the entire Theban Senate. Sophocles had the inspired idea of placing Antigone in glorious isolation; and, as Sir Donald F. Tovey said in a quite different context, "Nothing in human life and history is much more thrilling or of more ancient and universal experience than the antithesis of the individual and the crowd." It was Sophocles, too, who had Antigone affianced to Creon's son Haemon. Other changes, too, were rung in antiquity. For instance, in Euripides' Antigone, of which only parts survive, a tragic outcome was avoided through the outlandish intercession of the god Dionysus, and, incredibly, Antigone and Haemon were happily married. So a strong tradition of artistic license existed from the beginning.

It is easy to understand Anouilh's interest in this subject matter. The French have always enjoyed dramas that give free play to philosophical disputation. And modern French dramatists, with the shining example of Racine before them, have been especially drawn to ancient Greek legends. The trend started at the turn of the century with Gide, who wrote stage pieces about Philoctetes, Prometheus, and Oedipus. Montherlant turn-to Pasipha*e, and Cocteau dramatized Antigone, Orpheus, and Oedipus. Claudel turned to Proteus, and did a version of Aeschylus' entire Orestes trilogy. Giraudoux turned to Amphitryon, Electra, and the Trojan War, while Sartre refashioned the Oresteia in his Les Mouches. As part of this movement, then, Anouilh wrote not only Antigone, but plays about Eurydice and Medea.

Antigone holds a special historical position, too. Written in 1942 and first performed in 1944, it was the most important stage work to emerge during the Occupation. It was widely construed as a political allegory, the conflict between Antigone and Creon being viewed as that between the R*esistance and the collaborationists. The French people were divided, however, into those who found the play "fascist" and those who found it "antifascist." Thus Anouilh would seem to have achieved a good deal of the "negative capability" that Keats attributed to Shakespeare. And it is true that Anouilh did not stack the cards strongly in Antigone's favor as Sophocles had; a number of people even stoutly maintain that Creon is the true protagonist and hero of the work.

Ancient, But Up-to-date

Anouilh underlined the contemporaneity of his play by employing a good deal of low-level speech such as the ancient tragedians avoided, and by specifying the use of modern dress in performance. The current Stratford production is as up-to-date as today's newspapers. It is framed by the on-stage playing of a rock 'n' roll combo, with a bunch of teenagers frugging away (including Antigone's sister Ismene, in a yellow and black miniskirt). The Greek chorus has been reduced to a single commentator by Anouilh (as Shakespeare had done with the Chorus in Henry V); but here he is, as cleanly and expertly played by Tom Aldredge, an ambulating master-of-ceremonies, hosting the activities with a hand-microphone that feeds amplifying speakers on the wall, and occasionally smoking a cigarette. At one point he is irresistibly compelled to desert objectivity and intrude himself into the action in a vain attempt to change Creon's mind and save Antigone. It is a stunning moment, and here Aldredge quite rightly leaves his microphone aside. At another point, the Chorus holds up the play in order to give the audience a speech about Anouilh's view of the essence of tragedy. This was a frightfully dangerous thing for the playwright to do, but he pulled it off and Aldredge makes it work admirably.

High praise is owed to director Jerome Kilty '49, who has taken a clear stand and then seen to everything with an unflaggingly sure hand. There are those who consider the tale primarily a battle of the sexes. I have always thought this a silly view; Antigone could very well have been a boy, and the story would still have been perfectly valid. Kilty has chosen to play up the conflict of the generations--it's the teenagers versus their uncomprehending elders, who have made a mess of the world and deserve to be called to account. It is clear that Kilty has on his mind such things as our peace marchers, draft-card burners, and Berkeley protestudents. There is a 1967 ring about Antigone's outburst (in Lewis Galantiere's generally viable but not wholly satisfactory translation): "I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl."

Well-Matched Pair

The chief conflict in the play remains that between Conscience and Compromise. Although Antigone and Creon both appear in the earlier part of the work, they confront each other face to face only in the second half--and this tug-of-war is the heart of the play. In this production, the two principals are a worthy match for each other: Maria Tucci and Morris Carnovsky. Carnovsky is of course a known quantity. But I had never been especially struck by Miss Tucci's endeavors. Her Antigone, however, is miles above anything she has done before; it is in fact a performance of the first rank. Anouilh has lined up the arguments and swung his pendulum pretty equally, and the two Festival players interact magnificently on the same high level. The result is nothing short of electrifying.

In Sophocles' play it is primarily the gods and divine law that activate Antigone's conscience and drive her to her great act of defiance. Anouilh, however, watered down the religious overtones; he was more concerned with worldly power and man-made political laws. He made the clash essentially a temperamental one between two intensely human beings; and both Miss Tucci and Carnovsky are wondrously human.

Miss Tucci spends much of her time in an azure pants-suit, besmirched with the dirt she has used to bury her rotting brother. She projects artfully the ardor of the 19-year-old idealistic girl, one conscious of her age and nostalgic for her childhood ("Oh, it's just that I'm a little young still for what I have to go through."). And when she sits down and looks out into the audience, her beautifully sculptured expression sends one's mind back to thoughts of Greta Garbo. Her Antigone is proud and courageous and noble. But instead of a Sophoclean serenity she is seized with anguish. She is not so concerned with the eternal repose of Polyneices as with the right to dissent when conscience dictates. She tells Creon, "I am not here to understand.... I am here to say no to you, and die." But she is not against Creon personally so much as against the society he represents.

Power of Conscience

For whose sake does she break the law? "For nobody. For myself." Even though she knows Creon will remove the dirt, she also knows that "what a person can do, a person ought to do." It is said that mankind's strongest drives are sex, hunger, and self-preservation. But there are some people for whom conscience is just as strong, or stronger--at times terrifyingly strong. Antigone is one such; she prefers to die rather than to try to live with a guilty conscience and with compromise.

Towards the end of the play, when Antigone is in a prison cell and attempts to dictate a letter for Haemon, we are deeply moved by her momentary human lapse, "I don't even know what I'm dying for." Here Miss Tucci loses her poise and runs about the enclosure like a caged bird in panic. But when she finally exits to her death, she knows...yes, she knows. And so do we.

The Creon of Sophocles is a pigheaded, authoritarian tyrant who is absolutely confident of his own infallibility. The Creon of Anouilh-Carnovsky is quite different. We even learn that in his youth "he loved music, bought rare manuscripts, was a kind of art patron." But now he has become the sort of person against whom Archibald MacLeish has just warned us: "Man in the electronic age is not a votary of the arts--he has more serious business. He sees himself, whatever his economic system, as a social and scientific animal, the great unraveler of the universe, its potential master, and his tool is not the sculptor's chisel any longer or the brush that paints an image of himself--his tool is technological information.... Man cannot exist as man without an image of himself to question all he knows."

Anouilh's Creon is intelligent, dignified, and efficient. He didn't seek power, but "once I take on the job, I must do it properly." He is not without some compassion; he even offers to gloss over Antigone's first violation of his edict if she will agree not to repeat it. To him the burial of Polyneices is "meaningless," the people he governs are "featherheaded rabble," and "this whole business is nothing but politics." Carnovsky is marvelously forceful in describing his job ("Kings, my girl, have other things to do than to surrender themselves to their private feelings."), and in his extended Homeric simile about the ship of state, culminating with the terrible pronunciamento, "Nothing has a name--except the ship, and the storm."

A Living Death

Up to now Carnovsky has been dressed in a blue blazer and grey flannels. When he realizes he is not winning and that more drastic tactics are needed, he doffs his blazer and carries on the fight in sweater and shirtsleeves. In the end he loses not only Antigone, but also his son Haemon and his wife Eurydice. Now he is alone, and has only the living death of a cabinet meeting to look forward to. It is a touching moment when he tells his little page, winningly played by Billy Partello, "Never grow up if you can help it."

Anthony Mainionis' Haemon is adequate but somewhat colorless. Marian Hailey manages sufficiently to convey the weak-willed and vacillating Ismene--"infirm of purpose," to use Lady Macbeth's taunt. Antigones are rare, but Ismenes are a dime a dozen. Jane Farnol brings a good deal of warmth to the role of Antigone's devoted and solicitous old nurse. Richard Castellano, Edward Rutney, and Garry Mitchell, dressed in blue uniforms with red stripes, are fine as the three guards, who represent the majority of society; they are part of Creon's "featherheaded rabble." They are hard-drinking, vulgar-tongued, card-playing dullards...non-entities, really. They are utterly indifferent to what is going on around them, and couldn't begin to understand it even if they cared. They serve to underline Anouilh's prevailing pessimism about mankind. Kilty has also thrown in a couple of mute secret service men in grey suits and sunglasses, who go about their business with ominous dispatch.

Donald Oenslager has provided an aptly symbolic setting. Thebes has just been torn by civil war, and the stage is punctuated by four enormous red columns, all but one of which are badly cracked and chipped. Surrounding them, therefore, is a network of metal scaffolding, parts of which later fold in to Antigone's prison cell. This and Tharon Musser's fluid lighting allow the show to proceed for two hours straight through, as Anouilh intended, without intermission.

But it is to the issues raised by Antigone and Creon that one's mind keeps returning. Important among them is civil disobedience. When and to what extent is it justified? Will not the putting of conscience above law lead to anarchy?

Those who would condemn civil disobedience must face up to the fact that persons who have committed it in the past have not all been eccentric nuts, but have often been clearly vandicated by time. Socrates is one example; he chose to die in behalf of free speech. Gandhi is another; it was his sojourn in South Africa in the 1890's that led him to civil disobedience and arrest, and to the formulation of his theories of non-violent action (ahimsa and satyagraha). He took the view that every citizen is responsible for every act of his government. A new book on General Billy Mitchell has revived the story of his courtmartial, conviction and suspension from service. Mitchell has been proven right, but the only officer at the trial to vote for his acquittal was Douglas MacArthur, who some years later would have his own Harry S. Creon to contend with. The Nuremberg War Crimes trial raised the issue again. And in the past few weeks the headlines have been full of the trial and conviction of Muhammad Ali and Captain Howard B. Levy--both of whom refused to compromise with conscience.

The worriers can rest assured that anarchy is not about to sweep over the country. Even those who are civilly disobedient are not protesting all laws, but just one that they believe unjust. The Antigones of the world are always a tiny minority anyway. Not only must they have conscience developed to an unusual degree, but courage as well. Few people can meet the necessary specifications. The world has always needed the few, though, even when they turn out to be wrong. Law and all social institutions need to be questioned and challenged. The great philosopher Martin Buber was fond of pointing out that the Jews of the Old Testament constantly insisted on talking back to God, and that the back-talk was not exclusively verbal either. In the words of Scott Buchanan, "Laws are not dogmas; they are questions to be pursued." It will be a black day indeed when we have no Antigones among us. They have a special glory and a special immortality of their own.

Anouilh's Antigone is one of the most profound discussions of this crucial matter ever penned. I urge you to avail yourself of this transcendent play in its current transcendent production