To see what the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's present production of Bertolt Brecht's Antigone is driving at, it is almost obligatory to work through a maze of temporal displacements. The canonical status of Sophocles' fifth-century B.C. drama didn't prevent Brecht from producing an adaptation of the Greek tragedy in 1948. His version reaches the Festival's audience in a 1967 translation by Judith Malina, which returning BSF director Raine Bode has in turn fitted with costumes and scenery meant to recall the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Still, a play preoccupied with the spoils of conquest and the dangers of obedience can't help evoking the war currently raging in Iraq. In all likelihood, as the latest entry in the Festival's current "Season of Defiance," Brecht's state-and-society tragedy may have been intended to do precisely that.
It turns out that organizing something by Brecht is a fairly effective way to tap into the zeitgeist. A summer 2005 staging of the playwright's Life of Galileo at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, for instance, coincided nicely with the year's debates over intelligent design - which, like that script itself, pitted cultural creed against hard scientific fact. But an odd sense of timeliness can't always hide the flaws in Brecht's playwriting. Characters like his Antigone - at once transparent and eloquent - reward their spectators with knockout deliveries, though they also invite passages of glaring awkwardness. Bode seems deeply appreciative of the chosen script. Perhaps that's why this Antigone can't help reaching Brecht's dramatic highs along with a few embarrassing lows.
As the drama opens, the trials, horrors and losses of war remain fresh in the memory of Antigone (Christine Demuth), a Theban maiden who has lost her two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. The body of the treasonous Polyneices is to be left to the vultures as a warning to potential malcontents. Though this edict is brutally enforced by King Kreon (Stephen Patrick Martin), neither his threats nor the pleadings of Antigone's sister Ismene (Tara Bradway) deter the heroine from attempting her reviled sibling's last rites.
Once Antigone falls into Kreon's power, not even her engagement to the ruler's son Hamon (Owen Scott) can stave off her martyrdom. By the time the first act is over, Demuth's strong though sympathetic protagonist has taken a backseat to Martin's vision of monstrous officialdom. And this, as indicated in dramaturg Tony Tsendeas' production notes, is the main point of difference between the ethically-ambiguous Athenian original and Brecht's re-conception. But even if Demuth's solid portrayal of Antigone, perhaps by default, earns easy moral admiration, Martin's masterfully vicious performance makes a much stronger claim on the viewer's fascination.
Martin knows that making Kreon openly human would have backfired. The occasional naturalism that accompanies his character's wrath never undermines the more extreme moments in Kreon's story. These moments are given additional weight by the show's outstanding if intrusive Greek chorus (featuring Jen Plants, Noah Schechter, Molly Moores and John Benoit), along with BSF artistic director James Kinstle's glib turn as the blind prophet Tiresias. Since Brecht's classicizing impulses do not allow genuine onstage chemistry, these actors use largely declamatory deliveries that, here, run beautifully.
The production is loaded with scenery, staging and interpretive sequences that heighten its atmosphere of confrontation but that, artistically, range from powerful to regrettable. Scenic designer Kimberley Lynne has disguised the BSF's Elizabethan stage as a ruined building. With gaping portals and a half-dismantled car, the background generates a world marred by destruction and anticipating further upheaval. Bode's prologue is an attempt at creating a similar atmosphere - complete with pantomime, a pair of puppets and an offstage reading by actresses Zola Barnes and Ella Gensheimer (who, from the sound of it, both seem to be children). Surreal spectacles like this might have worked in the Festival's outdoor showing of Macbeth this summer. Still, while that production shifted rapidly from oddity to oddity, this fall's Antigone dwells on strange touches until they sour.
However, there are moments when the Festival's cast tempts one to disregard such bizarre maneuvers. The chorus' late addressesare absolutely astounding. Such a sequence is the apotheosis of the theatricality that informs Brecht's script and filters into the bulk of the production - a transformation of bombast and extensive narrative into something tangible, moving and nearly terrifying.
Ultimately, Bode's actors play Brecht's characters with all the ideological obviousness and monomania that they warrant. This doesn't nullify the show's more aggravating strategies. Yet it is a way of revealing the structural control and savage flourishes that, in the absence of Sophocles' dialectical complexities, are the main assets of Brecht's latter-day Antigone.
Antigone will play at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival through Nov. 11. Visit www.baltimoreshakespeare.org for more information.
