ANN ARBOR — In late October, I found myself in a nondescript building next to Main Street on the edge of Ann Arbor for a “guerrilla production” of Antigone. Tegwyn (the producer) and Claudia (director), were buzzing around, emitting excitement and some nervousness as a friendly crowd grew, pressing tighter and tighter into the entryway. This was community theater, we were told, and I felt it.
We filed into a room-in-progress. Plastic over windows to our left (stage right) flickered from passing headlights. Waves of cars made a soft roar that rose and fell, like waves on a shore. On the opposite side sat the Huron River, dark and quiet, and the railroad tracks, quiet except for the clatter of a train that would pass by about an hour into the production. Between the river and road and tracks, there was a distinct impression of being in the world, not outside of it, the illusion created by many dark, windowless theaters.
There was some wait before the start, and during that time I looked around at the people assembled. They sat chatting about the drive, the weather, and the upcoming election. I recognized some of them as co-organizers from the area, and for a moment I forgot we were supposed to be an audience—we could’ve been there to plan some collective action. But then an announcement, we applauded, and the production started.
Now I have to stop here and say I know very little about theater, and at that moment I knew even less about the story of Antigone. It’s been out for well over 2000 years, so I can’t say I had much of an excuse, but I’d never read or interacted with the story at all beyond receiving a five-minute “Antigone for dummies” crash course from a helpful friend a few weeks before the production.
Roughly it’s the story of a woman, Antigone (skillfully embodied here by Alexis Boyd), who comes face to face with her uncle, King Creon. Her brother has died on the battlefield, and she wants to give him a proper burial. He was on the losing side of the battle, though, and the current king wants to leave his corpse to rot as that of a traitor, without burial rights.
Antigone sneaks over to her fallen brother and gives him burial rites anyway, and at first gets away with it. But then she returns to the body and is caught! Why this disobedience to the king? Why the devotion to her already dead brother? These are questions that are posed through some comedy, and ultimate tragedy, through ranting and weeping and the wonderfully composed and performed songs throughout the play. I sat, enthralled, both by the unfolding drama and the ability of a group of people to come together and create a story—a live enactment of make-believe—that could speak to an assembled community and pose to them the deep questions of our humanity and history.
How is it that this miracle is performed? It seems like magic that with a minimal (but well-made) set and a few lights, we could enter into such an arrangement. It’s the people, ultimately, that carry it all through, and the cast really did. Antigone (Boyd) was defiant and bereaved. King Creon (Cedar Fields) sneered and raved, and demanded the audience’s hate. Jane Audriana, with comedic timing, nervously delivered messages and drew laughs. The whole production had a throughline of songs that were beautifully delivered—in some cases humorous, and in others especially haunting when sung in this nondescript building, nestled between river and road and tracks.
It strikes me that theater is a verb, that it has to be performed. You can record a play, but the recording is not the play itself. “Hunting is not those heads on the wall,” Amiri Baraka tells us. Theater always takes place in a time, in a place, with an audience- unlike many other forms of media that can be cut and pasted into our lives anywhere. Convenient, granted, but experiencing a story in my headphones at the airport hardly feels like a social experience in the same way.
Marx says that the key to reality is “sensuous human activity,” and that it’s the secret to overcoming the separation between subjects (me, for me; you, for you) and objects (everyone and everything else). That by acting in the world, we create ourselves as a part of the world, as humanity, the world seeing itself. We act in the world to overcome our separateness from it and from each other.
Marx also says that “man as an objective, sensuous being is, therefore, a suffering being—and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man energetically bent on its object.”
In this passion, we dream of an escape from suffering. And those dreams can lead us forward or lead us astray.
In Antigone, King Creon has a vision of society as an ordered house, with him as both father and ruler:
If I permit my own family to rebel
how can I earn the world’s obedience?
whoever is chosen to govern should be obeyed—
must be obeyed, in all things, great and small.
This vision is almost immediately disturbed by the suggestion that there are forces at work outside of this society:
It is the dead,
not the living, who make the longest demands
but do you
dishonor the laws of the gods
The gods stand outside of the present society, their laws are not the king’s laws. The dead haunt us, make demands of us. Marx famously said that a specter is haunting Europe, but more than that he said:
“Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realizing the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.”
There is something beyond religion, beyond politics as we know them, embedded in us already, that calls humankind to continue its work.
The king does everything he can to escape this, to ignore the demands of history and humanity, and comes to ruin, tragedy and regret:
The pains men will take
to come to pain
Ultimately, the play was cathartic to me. The king, full of pride and ego, ends up in despair. He wields his power to get everything he wants and gets to experience and understand that the ultimate result of his want is self-destruction. It’s not often that we get this in life. The mechanisms that guide our society are complex and abstract. People can be insulated from their own foolishness or short-sightedness. Or maybe they suffer the consequences, but the path from cause to effect is often too abstract to recognize as such.
The play sat in my head for weeks. I thought of people sitting in the dark, watching their dreams play out in front of them. I thought of “the unwritten, unfailing, eternal ordinances of the gods, that no human being can ever outrun.” We might not have a king, but our ruling class has surely broken these ordinances. So where is the grief, the regret?
When election night came and went, I could feel it and I could see it in the faces around me. When I talked with friends the next day, I could hear it in the tenderness of their voices. For others, there seemed to be a near elation—for what, I’m not sure even they could quite say. A friend I hadn’t talked to in a while called me, somewhat sheepish and excited, to tell me that he thought Trump was going to do a lot of good things. I didn’t want to ask for specifics. I didn’t even really know what to say. I just found myself thinking of Antigone. And grief. Grief over what? Lost futures? The feeling of powerlessness and impotence in the face of self-destruction? The uselessness of all the anger and ego?
I thought again of the last act—the ultimate human tragedy of regret. As Dr. Martin Luther King said of our world, “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”
How do we know when it’s too late? I don’t know how to answer that for certain, but surely as long as people are coming together in a dark half-finished room, to laugh and cry and ask questions on humanity, there must be some hope.
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