Two and a half thousand years after Sophocles won a generalship for “Antigone,” the tenacious girl still doesn’t want to relinquish her hold. In 441 B.C., in a marble amphitheater on some grassy hillside, a masked Antigone chose illegality over immorality. In that moment, the playwright posed an essential problem of civilization: our duties to the state versus our duties to ourselves. This year that debate has taken center stage in New York’s theaters. In the last six months, I have seen a half dozen productions at locations ranging from Classic Stage to the National Asian American Theatre Company.

Antigone has been interpreted and adapted by some of history’s finest minds, and those texts, in conjunction with modern translations of the ancient Greek, keep the work in the repertoire. Now the Women’s Project, which has championed women playwrights for a quarter century, has commissioned five new mini-Antigones. “The Antigone Project,” which opens tonight at the old Theater Four building on 55th Street, divvies Sophocles’s five scenes up between five playwrights: the production’s mastermind, Chiori Miyagawa; Lynn Nottage (author of “Intimate Apparel”), Karen Hartman (“Gum”), Caridad Svich (“Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell that Was Once Her Heart”), and Tanya Barfield (“Pecan Tan”).

Their short works take the Theban girl to the present day, the past century,even to the Underworld. Each, by imprinting her own aesthetic on the ancient story, shows an Antigone as resilient and controversial as ever.

Something about Antigone’s story captures the imagination of both the iron-booted and those underfoot. Hegel argued himself blue in his 19th-century face on Creon’s behalf. He saw a Germany rising that would supersede and improve “natural” laws. A century later, in Nazi-occupied France, Jean Anouilh turned the tide back in Antigone’s favor.

Anouilh balanced on a thin edge: His version of the play had to so befuddle Vichy censors that they would permit its production. Anouilh expanded the arguments between Creon and Antigone, making the state seem reasonable and generous in the face of Antigone’s shrillness. But in Anouilh’s Paris, the bodies of resistance fighters were hanging from lampposts. With that picture before their eyes, no audience could take Creon’s glibness as anything other than a mask for atrocity.

A version of Antigone showed up in tyrannized Romania; Brecht (of course) got his hands on her; Judith Malina seemed possessed by her in the Living Theater’s rage-filled 1960s production. Ms. Malina was haunted by Antigone’s “What one can do, that one must do,” once even spending a night in jail still in Theban costume.

In South Africa, Antigone helped rail against the apartheid regime in Athol Fugard’s “The Island.” The hit two-hander, which finished its final revival tour earlier this year, watched inmates at Robben Island (Nelson Mandela’s prison) breaking rocks and rehearsing a play. The play was, again, “Antigone.” A.R. Gurney’s “Another Antigone” even turned her into another Oleanna; making Creon a lofty professor undone by a vindictive co-ed. His is a favorite on the university circuit, where tyranny and high-handedness often get confused.

The quintuple production will pose a serious challenge to the Women’s Project – Ms. Svich’s segment alone calls for more than 60 video cues. But not one of the Antigone Project’s playwrights falls for the obvious choices in adapting the work.

In Ms. Nottage’s “A Stone’s Throw,” a modern African community stands ready to stone a young woman for promiscuity. Writing her scene backwards chronologically, Ms. Nottage makes us wait for the first moment of Antigone’s downfall, as innocent as any beginning ever was.

Ms. Barfield makes Antigone into the sister of a black soldier – one of World War I’s forgotten casualties. Now called Antoinette, she demands her due, the medal that a white soldier would get for the same sacrifice. Antigone will always serve as patron saint to the unfairly treated, and Ms. Nottage and Ms. Barfield discover her in far-flung fields.

In Ms. Hartman’s “Hang Ten,” a gentle recasting of Antigone as a surferboy’s babe, the playwright finds a rarer note to strike. Ms. Hartman’s Antigone giggles and ogles her lover’s washboard abs. She seems like close kin to Sophocles’s tragic heroine, destroyed just as her sexuality is about to flower. With the lightest possible touch, Ms. Hartman captures the devastating waste of youth that Sophocles placed at the heart of his drama.

Abandoning these specifics for a wider, stranger horizon, Ms. Miyagawa sets her action in the Underworld. Here Antigone berates her dead lover for excessive manliness, and her sister can’t keep her wars straight. It’s the very adaptability of the Antigone myth that Ms. Miyagawa dramatizes, its ability to soak up any conflict around it without losing its power.

Finally, Ms. Svich dangles out near the ultraviolet on the abstraction spectrum. In her “Antigone Arkhe,” Antigones from the past, statues that were once corpses, and long-lost recordings of our heroine’s voice exist as exhibits in an Antigone museum. Presided over by a befuddled curator, she becomes a gift-shop souvenir and learning tool, but she still seems destined to escape.

Sophocles leaves behind a lot to work with, and this year’s crop has tried not to let him down. A female, executive Creon presided at National Asian American Theater Company last season, highlighting the leader’s uncertainty and blind misogyny. Ellen Stewart’s production at La MaMa folded the story into its series of Greek works, beating the drum of ritual and catharsis with puppets and dance.

One Year Lease’s take on Anouilh’s version reveled in that author’s love of language, sometimes replacing characters’ bodies with spotlighted sandbags and voice-overs. Pictures of the Persian Gulf, a sand-covered floor, and the addition of a soldier’s letter home left no doubt about what war this UnConvention entry wanted to evoke – but Anouilh’s words would only let them go so far towards polemic.

So far, though, the laurels go to Mac Wellman’s brilliant reworking, as performed by the Big Dance Theater. This took as its meat the myth, the subsequent theoretical elaborations on the myth, and even logic itself. A philosophical narrator, who would rewind and reprimand the action, kept four “Fates” in line as they performed Antigone’s drama. The chattering girls re-enacted the debate, the sprinkling of dust, and the final descent into Antigone’s burial crypt, passing the story like an exam. As a reward, they become the Graces – passing Antigone’s test with Mr. Wellman’s flying colors.

The Women’s Project production will have to pass its own test, but on the basis of the texts alone, it does. (Performance is another problem, and in some ways not necessarily a fair one; throwing young actors into its maw, in the way companies never would with “Hamlet,” usually leaves them chewed and beaten.) In merely undertaking the effort, the participants make their “Antigone” part of a noble sisterhood.