Seeking license with a reworking of ‘Antigone’

A Noise Within’s world-premiere production of a new English-language adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s “Antigone” opened Saturday, marking the Pasadena-based company’s first staging of the ancient Greek classic, and only the second English translation of the play to be licensed by the Anouilh Estate since the Lewis Galantière adaptation premiered in 1946 on Broadway.

“The license is for this one run,” said Robertson Dean, who wrote and directs the new translation, which was read and approved by representatives of the Anouilh Estate. As part of the arrangement, Dean said, “they will come see the production, and then based on how it plays, [they] will decide if it will be recommended to be licensed permanently. “I’m taking it one step at a time.”

In the Sophocles classic, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, defies Creon, the dictatorial ruler of Thebes, to honor her dead brother — labeled a traitor — with the proper burial rites, fully aware that the act means her death.

“Antigone has no agenda,” Dean said. “She will simply do what is right. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks. I think she’s the greatest heroine in all of ancient literature. There is something so compelling about it, the story is so beautiful,” he said, “that I can hardly believe a human being came up with this.”

A graduate of Tufts and Yale, actor and director Dean has been a resident member of A Noise Within since 1998. The genesis of his translation and adaptation of Anouilh’s “Antigone” began when an actor friend at a social gathering asked him if he would consider directing her in the play.

Dean found the Galantière adaptation less than compelling. “I read the damned thing and it was impossible,” he said. It was “so tricked out, so ornate, and so lofty” (not unexpected for the commercial theater of the 1940s, he noted), “and I thought, I can do better than this.”

It became a calling. “And to tell the truth, I don’t know why,” Dean said. “Some things just have a momentum. They have to be done. And this — although I didn’t realize it when I started — is one of those things.”

Dean is fluent in Spanish, but had only “schoolboy French,” he said, “so, I took four people who are all absolutely bilingual — two were raised in the U.S., two were raised in France — and I sat down with them individually over the course of seven months and we went over every single word of the play.

“I wound up with four very lengthy and very annotated literal transcriptions, and then I threw away all my preconceptions and just did it,” Dean said. “Basically, I just wanted to get out of Monsieur Anouilh’s way.”

When Anouilh’s adaptation of the ancient Greek classic was first performed in Paris during World War II, it was widely perceived to be a reflection of the French resistance to the Nazi occupation.

Dean set his adaptation in Thebes in 1943, during the German invasion of Greece. It takes place in a royal palace whose war-torn ruins reveal “the detritus of [modern] royal existence mixed with the destruction of a great classical civilization,” he said.

Anouilh’s version “is a rapier. It slashes right through,” Dean said. “In French, it sounds like people talking and their lives depend on it.” That is what he aimed for, he said, emphatic that the impact of the play has not been trivialized with 21st-century informality. “That would have destroyed it,” he said.

His adaptation “is much more approachable, but it is not modern by any stretch of the imagination,” Dean said.

“There’s no colloquial garbage in it. It is like rich people in 1943 who are royalty in Thebes would talk. Instead of ‘I shall not go to bed,’ they say, ‘I’m not going to bed.’ That’s as modern as it gets. It isn’t some radical re-interpretation of the language,” he reiterated. “It’s not vulgar. It’s very violent, but that’s the play.”

“Antigone” is part of A Noise Within’s 2015-16 “Breaking and Entering” season, which also includes the West Coast premiere of David Ives’ translation of the Georges Feydeau farce, “A Flea in Her Ear,” running through Nov. 22, and Arthur Miller’s classic, “All My Sons,” playing Oct. 11 through Nov. 21.

Anouilh’s “Antigone” fits into the theme, said Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, A Noise Within’s co-artistic director, “because for us, [it] is about breaking down walls to enter another realm.

In this case, Antigone essentially topples a government. Her conviction is so strong. Here is this tiny, seemingly insignificant woman who changes the course of history. She’s really at the center of the ‘Breaking and Entering’ theme for the season.”

And the play is “so apropos of the times, “ Rodriguez-Elliott said, “because Antigone is certainly a hero, but it could also be argued that Creon is a hero, because he’s trying to reach compromise. And if we look at the challenges of our current government, there are perils to an uncompromising spirit. These great plays don’t just give you one side of an issue,” she said. “They allow you to look at both sides.”

Dean initially presented his adaptation of Anouilh’s “Antigone” in 2013 for A Noise Within’s free Words Within Resident Artists’ Play Reading Series.

“We thought it was so powerful,” Rodriguez-Elliott said, “and it made the work accessible. It’s a title we had floated doing a number of times, and once we heard Rob’s translation we were hooked. Plus, it was wonderful to have a project born at A Noise Within that came out of the artistic sensibility of our resident artists.”

“I didn’t expect anything beyond that night,” Dean said of the reading. Seeing it come to life as a fully staged production “is such a high. It’s like Christmas.”

And the time may be right for this particular play, he feels. “The idea that someone would do what is right at all costs. Would we, would I? This has made me reflect on my own morality, and my own bravery or cowardice in the face of many things.

“I don’t have a lot of things figured out when it comes to what really matters,” Dean added. “Antigone” has turned out to be “a personal exploration of that for me, and I hope it’s like that with other people.”

Conversations with the artists will follow the Oct. 4 matinee and the Nov. 20 evening performance.

What: “Antigone”

Where: A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd., Pasadena (corner of Foothill Boulevard and Sierra Madre Villa Avenue).

When: Repertory schedule: 2 and 7 p.m. Oct. 4 and Nov. 8; 2 and 8 p.m. Oct. 24 and Nov. 14; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 29 and Nov. 19; 8 p.m. Nov. 20. Ends Nov. 20.

Tickets: Start at $44.

More info: (626) 356-3100, ANoiseWithin.org

--

LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.