Another Antigone.

Rating:
Summary: A fine response to the classic
Review: I have taught Antigone often and find that too often there is simply a cliched response to it--poor Antigone vs. Creon the bad guy. What else is there to say? Quite a bit, but that's hard to elicit, especially since most students experience of the play, like their experience of serious drama generally, has been on the page. This play is in conversation with the original. Set in the "present," it involves a debate between a female student and a male professor of literature, and it works its subject up in a way that's less fatuous than what Mamet does in Oleanna which, I'm convinced, is merely a potboiler and does nothing to advance the discussion we might have about gender and, more broadly, the nature of authority. When I teach Sophpocles play, I note this one and encourage any student interested to do a longer paper on it, Anouih's play, (about the Nazi occupation) and this one. It helps complicate their responses to the original and understand why a classic is not merely deserving of mindless respect.