REVIEW : Updated ‘Antigone’ Rigorous Drama

A surprisingly good production of the rarely staged “Antigone,” French playwright Jean Anouilh’s modern-dress version of Sophocles’ tragedy, has brought rigorous drama to the stone-walled Davies Theater at Farnsworth Park in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Formerly called New Americana, the quaint Depression-era facility, built with WPA funds, is an apt venue for Anouilh’s updated play.

With intimidating Gestapo officers seated in the audience and a huge Nazi swastika hovering over the proscenium stage, the experience hints at what it must have been like when this drama premiered in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944.

Some background is in order.

Anouilh’s version eliminated Greek gods and the religious elements while heightening the political/moral battleground between the entitled heroine, who embodies freedom of choice, and her uncle, King Creon, who represents expediency and the rights of the state.

Amazingly, when produced in German-occupied Paris, the play placated Nazis and their collaborators while at the same time inspiring French Resistance fighters. Anouilh, smart man that he was, kept his mouth shut and never revealed his motives.

We know Sophocles’ motives. Antigone (created in 442 B.C.) was his greatest heroic character. The state was venal. Anouilh’s version, on the other hand, is fascinating--both for historical and contemporary politics--because it shifts sympathy from Antigone to her uncle.

Most persuasive is Creon’s argument that Antigone is acting childishly by her insistence on marching off to her death rather than compromising with the state and living a long life.

How far is too far, how stupidly stubborn is it, when you feel you must die for what is right? But, as Antigone sees it, the price is her very soul.

Thus, Anouilh had it both ways right under the noses of the Germans, who must have applauded Creon’s common-sense arguments while saboteurs and French freedom fighters secretly hailed the idealistic Antigone.

For all of Anouilh’s craftsmanship, the play today is a bit stilted. Compounding that intimidation is the theater’s cold, forbidding set design--Thebes in modern times--which makes the show almost as austere as it is invigorating.

The production, finally, is a gamble because it’s a play of language and moral argument of the headiest kind that you seldom see staged in county parks.

The company, Charmed Life Productions (formerly ensconced at the Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood) hopes to make a permanent home at county-owned Farnsworth Park on a diet exclusively devoted to the classics.

They’re off to a solid start. Co-Directors Frederick Hoffman and William Wintersole create more momentum than you would expect, and actress Anne Howard brings a burnished beauty to chilling tragedy in a pointedly credible Antigone.

She also gathers strength in the face of the excellent Hoffman as her coldblooded nemesis and increasingly sympathetic uncle. Elaine Di Blasio’s aged nurse, K. T. Harvey’s simpering, weak sister Ismene, Dana Williams love-smitten Haemon, William A. Masters’ humorous, black-shirted guard and Daniel Nathan Spector’s earnest messenger lend flavorful texture in supporting roles.

And that sneering, Gestapo-suited bully in the audience (Ed Wright), breaking into German expletives at lines he doesn’t like, is the genuine thing.

He and other Nazi moles also lurk about the house during the free buffet served an hour before the curtain.