The Fine Art of Sedition

Image is everything, and this isn’t good for the new leader’s image. Here it is, two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, and a dead body lies rotting in Pershing Square.

It’s the body of Polyneices, denied burial by the new ruler of the land, the media-mogul-turned-politician Krayon. (Think Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch after one too many antitrust lawsuits.)

Antigone, sister of Polyneices, knows what she must do. She puts down her electric guitar and, defying the martial law of the former United States, reminds us that no one leads an apolitical life: Everything we do or don’t do in the name of justice or injustice automatically qualifies as politics.

We only hear of the body; it remains offstage, just as it did in 441 BC. Cornerstone Theater Company’s eerie, seductive update of the Sophocles tragedy “Antigone,” a self-proclaimed “hijack” titled “An Antigone Story,” unfolds one block north of Pershing Square, in a street-level section of Hill Street’s Subway Terminal Building.

It is a raw and wonderfully cavernous space, wonderfully deployed by director-adapter Shishir Kurup. Krayon’s palace has been besieged by rebel forces, whose ranks included his nephew, Polyneices. “This place has really taken a beating,” everyone keeps saying in this version. It has. But it is a terrific place to see a Greek tragedy rethought for the early 21st century. We are in the near future and the distant past. The Subway Terminal Building has the dust of history in its lungs.

The Cornerstone ensemble’s nine performers have room to run here, to skate, to become part of a visually multilayered experience, body behind body, live and freeze-framed video imagery projected on a back wall. Two rows of seven pillars provide a kind of runway for the actors and for this “Antigone.”

Sophocles’ living monument to civil disobedience has inspired many admiring riffs throughout theatrical history. Notably, in the wake of World War II, Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation opened with a Berlin 1945-set prologue wherein two sisters--Antigone and Ismene--emerge from a bomb shelter.

Jean Anouilh’s postwar version coupled Sophoclean starkness with Anouilh’s own ashen, bone-dry irony. His Chorus deconstructs Antigone’s story even as it is being constructed. “The spring is wound up tight,” Anouilh wrote. “It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy.”

For the Cornerstone company, Kurup has borrowed strains and techniques of both Brecht and Anouilh, adding five songs of his own composition.

*

As the audience files into the makeshift seating area, television monitors update us on our nation’s whereabouts. We’re watching the state-controlled news channel, featuring promos for “Fryyyyyyday Night” (weekly executions--live!). The prophet Teiresias appears as a TV psychic. The on-air anchorwoman cheerily delivers news of Krayon’s one-strike-and-you’re-out policy before signing off with the tag line: “And, as always, report software piracy.”

Antigone (Page Leong) is here imagined as a mope-rock singer-songwriter. Her fiance, Hayman (Joseph Grimm), son of Krayon (Bernard White), is an e-trade analyst. The Chorus is respelled Korus, and in the wry persona of Peter Howard, he’s a documentary videographer recording footage of the unspooling tragedy.

For much of “An Antigone Story,” Leong--a grave and steely presence--gets around in a wheelchair. Leong sustained a leg injury during rehearsals for this production’s earlier incarnation at the Getty Center. (The Getty commissioned the piece.) She is but one whirling, gliding element in a fluid multimedia staging, and her face--frequently freeze-framed by Korus’ live video--haunts the production.

Not everything works. The freeze-frame device threatens to become a visual tic. Kurup throws a lot in the path of Antigone’s mission, so that we sometimes lose its dramatic thread. The original songs, the better ones recalling the blunt sociopolitical commentary of Brecht, don’t offer much tonal or rhythmic contrast to the text. Late in Act 2, “An Antigone Story” indulges in some play-within-a-play backstage sniping. The effect isn’t so much Brechtian or Pirandellian as simply mistimed. The uncoiling spring doesn’t need a kink at this point.

But by the end, when Kurup locates some gorgeously abstracted images for the inevitable bloodletting, we’re back on solid ground. Or endlessly shifting ground, actually.

Kurup and company give voice to many points of view, without turning a great tragedy into a mere community forum. And it has the guts to state Antigone’s case clearly. If the law prevents her from burying her brother, well, then, as Ismene tells her uncle: “Change your [expletive] law.”

* “An Antigone Story (A Hijack),” Cornerstone Theater Company at the Subway Terminal Building, 417 S. Hill St., downtown. Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Aug. 20. $10 to $15. (213) 613-1700, Ext. 31. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Mark Bringelson: Sgt. Rojas

Gracy Brown: Ismene

Tamar Fortgang: Eurydice

Omar Gomez: Pvt. Rojas

Joseph Grimm: Hayman

Peter Howard: Korus

Page Leong: Antigone

Gezel Nehmadi: Fanny

Bernard White: Krayon

Adapted from Sophocles and directed by Shishir Kurup. Music and lyrics by Shishir Kurup. Scenic and costume design by Christopher Acebo. Lighting by Geoff Korf. Sound by Paul James. Choreographers Michele Spears and Ken Roht. Videographer John J. Flynn. Production stage manager Bridget Kirkpatrick.