Loud and clear There’s no missing Antigone’s message BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Antigone Adapted by Lewis Galantiere from the play by Jean Anouilh. Directed by Bryna Wortman. With Courtney Lynne Edge, Sean Michael McConaghy, Anna Tobias, T.W. Hurdle, Trevor Campbell, Melissa A. Banks, Lauren K. Ystaszewski, and Jed Hancock-Brainerd. At URI Theatre through October 18.

The Greeks did their theatrical moralizing, which all their tragedies involved, so much better than medieval Christians did with their cartoonish morality plays — thoughtfully more than instructionally. The Lewis Galantiere adaptation/translation of the Jean Anouilh adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone is a rare case of playing a high art party game of Telephone in which the message at the end comes out clearer than when first spoken. Clearly and passionately, the current production by URI Theatre conveys the contemporary voice given to the play’s eternal message.

Antigone (Courtney Lynne Edge) has attempted to bury her brother Polynices, against the edict of Creon (Sean Michael McConaghy). To not do so would allow his soul to wander the netherworld forever, so she knew what she had to do. The king of Thebes knows he has to abide by the law he issued, and have his niece executed for disobeying it to preserve order.

This version was modernized in several ways. Instead of a commenting chorus of a dozen or more, there are only two in the URI production. One is an old man, blind like the soothsayer Tiresias (who comes into Sophocles’s version, but not Anouilh’s). He is well created by T.W. Hurdle with an earnest conversational tone ("Let me tell you about Creon . . ."). The other is a woman in peasant garb, including gnarled boots that suggest hard farm work. Anna Tobias is even more intense than Hurdle, appropriately and quietly so, forging emotional links to the proceedings that skillfully pull us in. Director Bryna Wortman has made sure that this concentrated chorus keeps us focused on the musing undercurrent as well as the action.

Yes, the entire atmosphere is as important as the words. So Patrick Lynch’s scenic design is crucial — and effective. The requisite broken columns are filled out by a stone texture motif that echoes agelessness, complemented by details that will make sense only as the play unfolds — a ragged doll leaning against a pillar, for example. The only other modern detail onstage is a writing desk and chair, Creon’s seat of power. (A computer keyboard lies under the open stage platform, reinforcing the cross-era subconsciousness of the story.)

As with most tales from legend or history — this one is the former, but originally purported to be the latter — the unfolding of the plot is not the payoff. This compelling adaptation has the chorus editorializing on the nature of melodrama, in which deaths are arbitrary, versus tragedy, which explores the inevitabilities of the human condition. Anouilh first staged this play in Nazi-occupied France, when such matters were of life-and-death seriousness.

Edge gives us a defiant and resolute Antigone, but without a note of stridency that would diminish her action and suggest that it might have been merely impulsive. She was, after all, a young woman who led her self-blinded father, King Odysseus, out of wilderness with her sister Ismene (Melissa A. Banks). Ismene tries to talk her out of admitting her deed, as Haemon (Trevor Campbell), the man she is to wed, would have done if she had let him know in time. Playwright Anouilh makes this play less about what Antigone did than about what she knew she was giving up in order to do it. Coming home right after she committed her crime, she knew that the rosy-fingered dawn that she appreciated was the last she would see.

Antigone is also about why in the world we don’t similarly do what we know is our duty, regardless of consequences. Her decision to bury her dead brother is not about his worthiness. The vicious Polynices is as he was, a rotten brother, "an enemy in our house," as Ismene describes him. Antigone admits to her sister that "I am an awful coward," that she doesn’t want to die, yet she acts.

Her argument with Creon is the heart and soul of this adaptation, as the Fates were in Sophocles’s play. Hoping that her act was impetuous, he tries to convince her to keep quiet about it, so that he won’t have to have her killed. He informs Antigone how Polynices was an even worse human being than she knows, that he struck their father in a spoiled-child tantrum, and worse. He implores her to think about Thebes’ welfare more than her family’s and not inflame the rebellion. No dice.

This production is as strong as it is largely due to how successfully McConaghy humanizes Creon. He makes the king act out of self-righteous pride rather than ego, honestly hoping to keep together a fractious populace. His Creon is not merely sweet-talking Antigone; he hates the idea of having to harm her. This is the sort of fully dimensional tyrant that must have been created in the original 1944 production. Then the Nazi officers at the premiere were applauding rather than shutting down the show, because it included arguments by Creon that could justify collaboration. Anouilh’s sort of fearless examination of human behavior is why playwrights — and actors and directors — make plays instead of essays.