An Antigone of unearthly beauty is current at the Park Avenue Armory, where its imported production by the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center of Japan offers a striking visual and aural interpretation of the 2,500 year-old Greek classic.
Talk about an immersive experience!
Instead of a stage, the vast Drill Hall space features a wide pool of ankle-deep water out of which protrude a number of outcroppings that resemble primitive rock cairns. Here, a 29-member company, clad in gauzy white and silver draped costumes, slowly proceed in often ritualistic movement through the play, which is performed in Japanese with projected titles.
These shimmering circumstances suggest those underworld rivers, such as Styx and Lethe, which separate the living from the dead in Greek mythology.
Certainly Antigone, the valiant protagonist of Sophocles’ drama, never ceases to be haunted by her deceased relatives in the royal house of Thebes, even as she risks death to bury her brother honorably in defiance of her uncle Creon’s edict to let him rot on the battlefield.
This ancient saga of a lone resister to tyranny remains a relevant affirmation of individual courage and decency. The fact that she is a woman confronting a patriarchal society makes Antigone, the heroine and the play, all the more impactful today.
Theatergoers unfamiliar with the story need not fear: In addition to the projected titles (which might be a tad larger in type face), some members of the company assemble on the perimeters of the pool before the show begins to deliver a verbal summary of the plot in English. The Park Avenue Armory’s handsome and informative program also provides a synopsis as well as several interpretative essays.
This North American premiere, wonderfully staged by Satoshi Miyagi, Shizuoka’s artistic director, might cause veteran spectators to recall certain of the epics created by Robert Wilson. Like those events, the look is surreal, the pace is deliberate, the stylized movement of the chorus is stately, and the emotional temperature, for the most part, tends to be rather cool.
Interestingly, each of the characters here is performed by two actors; one to speak, the other to embody the individual. Suggesting Bunraku-style puppet theater, this dual approach allows the vocal actor and the physical actor to express their character’s voice/movement at a higher extreme than a single individual would be capable of achieving at the risk of appearing overblown.
Often, Koji Osako’s lighting design—which tends to be sculptural and infused with sorrowful blue and purple tints—throws enormous shadows of the players against the theater’s back wall in order to lend further grandeur and drama to the event.
Integral to the production’s power is a Philip Glass-y sort of score composed by Hiroko Tanakawa and rendered by musicians at the rear of the pool. Percussive, at times even thunderous, the nearly ceaseless music serves to punctuate and drive the drama, which runs an intermission-less 1:45, but scarcely seems so lengthy, thanks to the fascinating, even slightly hypnotic, nature of Miyagi’s staging. Let’s also credit the lovely visuals designed by Junpei Kiz (set) and Kayo Takahashi (costume) with further enhancing the drama’s impact.
It should be remembered that back in Sophocles’ day, plays were presented as major spectacles performed with highly stylized staging effects. So the Shizuoka company’s fine production of Antigone, deeply infused and immersed as it is in Japanese culture, offers an unusual homage to ancient Greek theater as well as a memorable interpretation of an eternal classic.
Antigone opened September 25, 2019, at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through October 6. Tickets and information: armoryonpark.
