‘Antigone’: an epic that seems familiar

A meaningless, devastating war. A government quick to quash human rights by invoking homeland security. A leader who consolidates his power by demonizing someone arbitrarily chosen to be the enemy.

All this may sound like the moral landscape of 2003, but the Greeks of 442 BC had a word for it -- and the word was “Antigone.”As told by Sophocles, the story of a woman who defies a heinous edict as a matter of conscience now comes to us in a lightweight production by Big Dance Theater of New York -- a production focused on the inability of language, and theater, to communicate such a momentous theme.

At UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on Thursday, Mac Wellman’s adaptation found the Three Fates performing the popular music of Uzbekistan, dancing what narrator Leroy Logan aptly called “nothing dances” and, here and there, re-enacting Antigone’s story as a kind of theater game.

Wellman portrayed their various divertissements as an hour-long transition in which they changed into the Three Graces. But they seemed more like the three little pigs in Disney’s cartoon or the three little maids from school in “The Mikado”: chattering like an audiotape rewound at high speed or spouting inanities in parodies of a portentous Greek chorus.

“Lost in a wilderness of logic,” Wellman’s Antigone (Didi O’Connell) did defy authority but defined herself as “tired of being wise.” Largely invulnerable to the issues and emotions of the story, she resolutely avoided anything approaching tragic stature except briefly in the speeches of death and transfiguration near the end. If the Fates sounded deliberately banal, she remained picturesquely down-home: Auntie Antigone.

Director Paul Lazar also comically undercut the authority of the fatally inflexible ruler Creon by introducing many of his scenes with the sound of a cuckoo clock. Kourtney Rutherford, however, downplayed dementia in favor of reckless arrogance and self-absorption -- the closest thing to a conventional performance and a kind of anchor for everyone else’s excess.

In appearance and delivery, Logan seemed to channel Monty Woolley (character actor and friend of Cole Porter) right down to quoting Porter’s “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” near the end. Besides explaining some of Wellman’s strategies, his duties included periodically assuming the role of E Shriek, an unknown god given to such proclamations as “I am what lies outside language.”

Not true, unfortunately, for everything about the Big Dance Theater’s “Antigone” stayed inside language -- obsessed with its cliches, platitudes, fallacies, syllogisms. Even Annie-B Parson’s dances mined a decorative, reach-and-swirl style that was a cliche before Martha Graham reconceived ancient Greek tragedy as contemporary dance drama.

Deconstructing the language of tragedy without opening up another avenue of discourse (as Graham did) risks making theater inconsequential -- a warehouse of hollow, outmoded expression. And clever inconsequence was the most that Big Dance Theater provided at UCLA. This was not the penetrating look at the manipulation of rhetoric that Societas Raffaello Sanzio ventured in “Julius Caesar” on this stage last season -- merely an outburst of impotent gallows humor at the erosion of meaning.

However, events such as next week’s “Lysistrata Project” (a worldwide protest against Gulf War II using Aristophanes’ most famous comedy) suggest that the ancient Greeks have more to offer this millennium than opportunities for semiotic charades. And theater artists need to be listening.

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‘Antigone’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Westwood

When: Tonight, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.

Price: $15 (UCLA students) to $35

Contact: (310) 825-2101

Running time: One hour, no intermission