Tragic Tragedy

WHEN A PERIOD of history becomes ancient, the accomplishments of the age become grand. Perhaps the ability to survive a millenium or two or three makes these works larger than life.

Antigone, the third play in the Sophocles trilogy which includes Oedipus the King, was big in the Athens of Ancient Greece and is still big in Cambridge, but the performance in the Quincy House Junior Common Room is anorexic.

Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, decides to bury her just-deceased brother, Polynices, although a city law forbids it. Antigone had already buried her parents and her other brother, Eteokles, who had followed Oedipus to the throne. But because Polynices raised an army and attacked his own homeland and brother, the new king of the city, Creon refuses to allow her to bury the traitor. Creon, their uncle, wants the dead Polynices torn apart by wild dogs.

Pretty gruesome stuff, but none of it's in the play. Most of the performance takes place after Creon discovers that it was Antigone, his son's fiance, who buried the body of Polynices. Now he must decide how to punish her. He chooses the death penalty. Bad move, as the seer Tiresias tells Creon, because decreeing the death penalty gets one prematurely sent to to Hades. Acting like a god isn't advisable in Greek drama, and in the end Creon pays for it. His son and wife both commit suicide.

THE QUINCY PRODUCTION, directed by April Limbaugh, proves unable to flesh out these powerful events into convincing drama. Failing to inject personality into their characters, the actors seemed to think that the verse could speak for itself. Reading Antigone is one thing, but on stage the actors need to convey a sense of the people on whom the tragedy has fallen.

One person who does accomplish this is David Silver. He has four roles, Antigone's sister, a sentry, Creon's son, and the messenger. He does justice to all of them. But his performance as the sentry is a highlight of the play. Watching him itch and listening to him stutter, the audience gets a sense of the character--a bewildered common man stuck in the midst of a battle of kings and gods.

As in all Greek dramas, Antigone has a chorus. But the chorus in this production fails miserably. They stumble over each others' words and when they eventually manage to speak simultaneuously the sound is hardly melodious. But the most obvious problem with the chorus is they don't know what to do with themselves when they aren't speaking. Instead of removing themselves from the audience's eye, they become even more conspicuous by making obviously forced expressions, fidgeting and staring off into space. The chorus seems to have become a theatrical anachronism.

Limbaugh's direction is appropriate because it doesn't dominate the play. Most effective is the sparse set, which allows the grand verse to stand out on its own. The performance runs very quickly, under 90 minutes, which makes it bearable. But Elizabeth Wirick, Creon's attendant, deserves kudos for managing to stand by the king's side all that time and keep a straight face despite her lack of lines.

In the end, the lines, the verse written by Sophocles, provide something of a worthwhile performance. But that type of entertainment can be found in Widener, and isn't worth spending the money to hear.