When going to see a theatre production at a college theatre you’ve never been to before, you never know what you’re going to get. College theatre is of notoriously varied quality. Which is why I was so pleased with Juniata College’s production of Antigone, directed by Leigh Hendrix. While there were some performance limitations, the show took a lot of interesting risks and made unique interpretive choices that made for an engaging and thought-provoking performance.

Sophocles’ Antigone is one of the ancient Greek playwright’s best known works, and it has been subject to intensive philosophical debate over the years. The play tells of the clash between Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, and Kreon, who has inherited the throne of Thebes after the civil war in which Eteokles and Polyneikes killed one another— they were Antigone’s brothers, who were supposed to alternate ruling Thebes until Eteokles decided to exile his brother and keep the throne for himself. Kreon declares that Eteokles should receive a hero’s burial while Polyneikes should remain unburied, and that anyone who performed any funeral rites for him would be executed. After her sister Ismene refuses to help, Antigone goes and buries her brother’s body. She is arrested, and after arguing with Kreon over the gap between divine law and the law of the city-state, is sentenced to be walled in a cave. Kreon’s son Haemon argues for mercy, but his father ignores him, and as the guilt mounts against Kreon for his inflexibility the play ends with Antigone dead, as well as Haemon and Kreon’s wife Eurydike.

One interesting choice at the Juniata production was an all-female cast. The majority of roles in Antigone are male roles, and one of the ways the play has often been read (including by Jacques Lacan) is as a feminist struggle between Kreon representing the masculine power of the state on the one hand, and Antigone representing pre-political feminine kinship networks on the other. In casting Christine Reilly to play Kreon, Anna Sismour to play the guard, and a chorus consisting of four female actors, the Juniata production replaced the masculine authorities of the king, the military, and the chorus of elderly Theban men with female performers. The all-female cast is particularly interesting in light of Judith Butler’s argument in Antigone’s Claim, where she theorizes that Antigone represents not the feminine antithesis of Kreon, but a queer deformation of both Kreon’s (masculine) position as head of the state, and a deformation of the pre-political family because of her almost incestuous focus on her brother’s body (as well as being the offspring of Oedipus). When the entire cast is female, this queer challenge to social power structures is doubly reflected back, as Kreon’s masculine authority becomes a performance increasingly divorced from Reilly’s physical body.

There were also a lot of interesting individual performance choices. Beginning with the titular character, Antigone (Samekh McKiever) was much more afraid than I typically picture the character. McKiever took Antigone in a different direction than I have imagined the heroine, because after her arrest McKiever repeatedly drew back from Kreon, tried to escape, and sought help/sympathy from the elderly chorus. I picture Antigone as a character who seeks her own death, a lady who doth protest too much that she wants to live. But McKiever’s performance was of an Antigone who wants to live, and whose fine speeches about accepting death seemed as much an attempt to convince herself as anyone else. The performance challenged my take on the character in a way I found refreshing and engaging.

On the other hand, I didn’t care for Shamya Butler-Bonner’s portrayal of Ismene (who is one of my favorite characters, disproportionate to her relative role in the play). To be clear, there was nothing wrong with Butler-Bonner’s acting, or even with the interpretive choice. But the anger she brought to the character is totally foreign to the way that I see Ismene. In her interactions with McKiever early in the play, Butler-Bonner’s energy was much higher than McKiever’s, and her tone was more outraged. For me, Antigone is the sister whose anger burns from the inside out, whereas Ismene has, in my mind, the survivor’s drive to live quietly and unobtrusively to avoid further destruction.

The other major performer who made a big impression was Reilly, playing Kreon. Kreon is, for much of the show, a tough character to make work because he spends the bulk of the time as a kind of swaggering tin-pot dictator making edicts and demanding he have his own way. And Reilly wasn’t always fantastic in that element, but where she really delivered a powerful performance was at the play’s end, when she brought in the lifeless body of Haemon (Rina Kirsch), and the body of Eurydike (Corey Atkinson) is brought out of the palace. In that grief and despair, Reilly really shone. With bloody hands, and on her knees between the bodies of her family members, Reilly wailed the grief of a king brought from the height of power to complete despair.

Apart from the performances, the set, designed by Apollo Weaver, added a unique and innovative component to the performance. The back wall was a Greek façade with columns and double doors, then a performance space echoing ancient Greek theatres—with a raised platform up stage and a semi-circular orkhestra downstage—but what was intriguing was the ring of dirt around the orkhestra, which can just be seem in the photo above. Most of the ring of dirt was dry, but the section at the center of the stage, where the stairs down from the orkhestra to the ground were, was mud. And as characters walked through that mud, it was tracked progressively onto the stage. So as the play went on, the stage became dirtier and dirtier, turning the white marble(-looking) set brown. Then at the end of the play, when Kreon brings on Haemon’s body, the mud that has been accumulating the entire show is mixed with blood. A symbol of the sad and squalid condition that Kreon’s hubris has brought to Thebes.