A Taut ‘Antigone’ Update Sees Sophocles’ Heroine Battling Contemporary Forces

No contemporary playwright has addressed the fraught subject of female autonomy with more intellectual honesty than Anna Ziegler. Through characters ranging from a groundbreaking physicist, in the biodrama “Photograph 51” (a vehicle for Nicole Kidman in London), to an Orthodox Jewish wife and mother in “The Wanderers,” Ms. Ziegler has presented women grappling with social restraints and biases without reducing them to victims entirely devoid of agency.One of her boldest plays, “Actually,” put forth a he-said/she-said scenario, in which a white female college student charged a young Black man attending her school of sexual assault, adding race to the mix. Not long after its New York premiere in 2017, a leading newspaper published a critic’s lament listing it among several new shows that helped perpetuate the notion that such accusations are frequently false; these works, the headline declared, were “too murky” — as if sex could be as neatly and objectively evaluated as math equations.Ms. Ziegler’s latest play, which has opened at the Public Theater, is unlikely to generate such controversy. “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” is the second production inspired by its title character to arrive off-Broadway this year, but unlike the first, Alexander Zeldin’s pretentious “The Other Place,” it doesn’t use the Sophoclean heroine to promote the sort of collective male guilt suggested in that editorial.Mind you, the Antigone we meet in this new play would be familiar with the concept of toxic masculinity. That’s because she’s a thoroughly modern young woman — or rather, an image of one who haunts a thoroughly modern middle-aged woman. The latter is identified in the script as simply Chorus, and in keeping with the definition of that term in traditional Greek drama, she addresses the audience, offering expository details and insights.This Chorus, who is played shrewdly and with great compassion by Celia Keenan-Bolger, a Tony Award-winning Broadway veteran, also has her own story, one that gradually invites parallels to Antigone’s. The narrator insists she was confused by Sophocles’ tragic protagonist at first, when she was assigned the play in the tenth grade, but admits she has “kept finding” the character in various places since then.This older woman is pregnant, which turns out to be a key detail: Ms. Ziegler has written in a playbill note that she wanted to consider “how female bodies have been treated across time,” and reproductive rights — and the fact that men continue to play a disproportionate role in determining them — figure heavily in the play.Antigone is immediately established as someone who would lead a protest. She turns up, played by a marvelous Susannah Perkins and costumed by Enver Chakartash, in a leather jacket over a plaid skirt and artfully clashing knee socks, her short mop of red hair sticking out like a lit cigarette match. She skips the coronation of her uncle, Creon, to flirt with a meek Achilles at a bar, and uses trendy expressions such us, “Just tell me like I’m five.”But however much a rebel or a spitfire, this Antigone cannot, any more than the original, triumph over the larger forces represented by Creon — who is himself portrayed here as deeply conflicted. Tony Shalhoub, predictably, brings a wonderfully wry wit to the second role, capturing the leader’s sometimes comical haplessness but also the frustration and, eventually, anguish it produces, for him and others.Under Tyne Rafaeli’s taut, tender direction, the other players deliver similarly intricate, perceptive performances. Calvin Leon Smith is especially moving as Haemon, Creon’s son and, inconveniently, Antigone’s fiancé, charting the character’s evolution from a sort of besotted puppy to a fierce defender driven equally driven by love and righteousness.It’s Susannah Perkins, though, who ultimately gives this production its robust, ultimately harrowing soul. Granted, Ms. Ziegler has provided a heroine that any performer would relish — and perhaps even more refreshingly, one who encourages audiences to think rather than judge.

A Taut ‘Antigone’ Update Sees Sophocles’ Heroine Battling Contemporary Forces

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