Review: ‘Antigone’ at Court Theatre has a cast ready to take this play in new directions
In 2017, I saw the young Chicago actress Aeriel Williams in “Black Pearl” at the Black Ensemble Theatre, a show about Josephine Baker. I remember thinking she was the kind of phenomenal new musical-theater talent likely to go on to a Broadway show or maybe an appearance on “America’s Got Talent.” I cannot say I thought her trajectory would lead to her playing Sophocles’ Antigone in a Greek tragedy at Court Theatre some seven years later.
But it did. And she’s just fabulous in the part. How cool is that?
So, for that matter, is Timothy Edward Kane, who plays her antagonist, Uncle Creon. And so is Julian Parker, playing a role that the translator (the late Nicholas Rudall, the founding artistic director of Court) rendered as Watchman Who Becomes Messenger. He’s a pivotal part of the narrative trajectory here as Antigone and Creon bash away at each other, the former having buried her traitorous-to-the-state brother despite the latter’s firm edict to the contrary.
I suspected at first that Creon would be rendered as villainous and, for sure, his arguments that the law is the law and a feisty relative just can’t get a boutique exemption get relatively short shrift, at least in terms of what Sophocles, the Greek tragedian who appreciated a good, equal argument, surely intended. No lines here get more emphasis than Creon’s insistence that their difference in gender means Antigone should shut up. Sophocles bringing that up actually was a radical act at the time, in the opposite political direction to the way it plays here. But Kane is too rich an actor to become a paper tiger in a deconstruction of the classical patriarchy and, in the end, you do feel for the guy with the heavy burden, even if the focus is on his realization of his mistakes more than the impossibility of his position.
The director, Gabrielle Randle-Bent, has set the show pretty explicitly within Black culture, of an indistinct time and place. At the start, we hear a recording of the director’s own relatives discussing a woman refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Texas in the 1940s, which is a very intriguing prologue, and the show experiments with verse and language in very interesting ways, ranging forwards and backwards in time. The blind seer Tiresias here is played by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, an actor with a very distinct kind of moral authority and the fine, two-person chorus of Danielle Davis and Cage Sebastian Pierre speak into microphones, playing with sound, even as Parker feels like a Black everyman under the oppression of the white law.
Antigone, close readers of that play will know, has her theatrical and diva-like side, whatever the righteousness of her position (in contrast with the self-effacing Ismene, deftly played here by Ariana Burks). Williams leans into that tension between Antigone seeking a kind of glamorous martyrdom and yet also being a genuinely sincere, and courageous, political rebel. She has to be flawed for the play to work, especially given how Randle-Bent has stacked the overall deck and Williams’ performance, which is chilly and elusive when it needs to be, and warm and needy at other moments, actually makes that happen. Wonder what she’ll do next.
Randle-Bent is a hugely talented theater artist, the kind of visual stylist with a precise and detailed idea for every moment. (The set designer John Culbert has forged a copasetic, expressionistic design, pushing the action forward on the stage, suiting the nature of the play.) Her hamartia, though, is taking those ideas so far that the work feels pretentious and academic, which then undermines what she really wants to do here in terms of locating this ancient play within American race history and also making it accessible to a broad audience.
I felt that adding a lot of weird, stylized movement to the interactions between Antigone and Haimon (Matthew C. Yee) mostly got in the way of what these stellar actors could have done better by just, well, relating to each other — and also pitching Antigone into a long blackout served mostly to undermine what has been our close relationship with the character up until that point.
Sometimes, potentially great directors just have to learn to trust their actors, embrace simplicity, and get out of the way of their own perfectly decent early decisions.
“Antigone” is a play made for Hyde Park and the campus of a university dedicated to hearing all sides; no wonder it’s selling fast.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Antigone” (3 stars)
When: Through March 2
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Tickets: $56-$88 at 773-753-4472 and www.courttheatre.org