“The killer and the killed are all one family.” This line, spoken near the end of Sophocles’s Antigone, is hauntingly echoed in the title of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. One play premiered in an ancient Athenian amphitheater, the other premiered about a millennium-and-a-half later in the Broadway theater that now houses The Book of Mormon. These plays come from two different cultures, but were written in the same theatrical tradition. Both plays are about “respectable” men and the pain they inflict on everyone around them through their pride and vanity. Both plays deal with the conflict between the needs of the state and the needs of the individual. Both plays take imposing political quandaries and scale them down until they feel intimate and immediate. The pain of one family becomes the pain of the world.
I realize I’m probably not making either of these shows sound like a fun night out. There’s an old theatrical story about a theatergoer who walked out of a production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (or maybe it was Death of a Salesman, or Gypsy, or Hamlet), yelling “IF I WANNA WATCH A DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY, I’LL STAY HOME!” The story is probably as mythical as Antigone, but the point stands: A lot of people don’t want to pay good money to be emotionally purged with pity and terror. Works of art that deal with “difficult” subject matter are described and marketed with adjectives like “important” and “necessary,” which makes them sound more like medicine than entertainment. We tend to associate pleasure with joy and playfulness, not intensity and seriousness, but it’s a false binary—these plays are very serious, but just because they’re serious doesn’t mean they’re joyless. For one thing, both of these shows do have a sense of humor—Anne Carson’s new English translation for Antigone is leavened with dry wit, and Miller managed to work a few corny Capra wisecracks into All My Sons. Beyond that, there is a very specific kind of enjoyment to be found in both of these shows—the joy of watching talented actors take on towering roles.
The set for Antigone (by Jan Versweyveld, who also designed the lighting) is terse and dark, illuminated mainly by a disk of harsh light mounted in the middle of a sterile white backdrop. It’s very appropriate, if maybe a little on the nose, for a play that starts grim and only gets grimmer. At the outset of the play, we learn that the brothers Polyneikes and Eteokles (the sons of Oedipus—technically his brothers as well, but we don’t need to get into that) have killed each other in battle. A little mythological background: Eteokles was the ruler of the city-state of Thebes, and Polyneikes, driven out of Thebes by his brother, mounted a treasonous insurrection against Eteokles. Kreon (uncle of Eteokles and Polyneikes), the new ruler of Thebes, has ordered that Polyneikes’s body should be left unburied. This does not sit well with Antigone (sister of Eteokles and Polyneikes), who goes to bury her brother and is arrested and sentenced to death by Kreon. Got all that?
The big draw of the play is Juliette Binoche in the title role, but it is not a star turn in the conventional sense. She certainly puts herself through the wringer, playing Antigone as an outwardly brave woman who cannot betray her moral principles but still fears her fate. However, she is simply one member of a terrifically tight eight-actor ensemble, all of whom commit wholeheartedly to the emotional marathon that Sophocles puts his performers through. Under the direction of Ivo van Hove, every actor in the ensemble, including Binoche, takes on the role of the omniscient Chorus at one point or another. This is different from the usual convention—having the Chorus played by an indistinct blob of actors—but van Hove takes pains to remind the audience that this is a capital-C contemporary Antigone.
Instead of togas and tunics, the actors are costumed (by An d’Huys) in snappy suits and dresses; Kreon (played with sneering verve by Patrick O’Kane) lounges around on a black leather sofa. These modernistic design choices are easy on the eyes but remove any specific historical or political context from the play, placing its characters in a generic present day. There are also screen projections and pulsating music, which are distractingly omnipresent—this is especially apparent in the last scene, when all the actors leave the stage and the final moments of the play are dominated by a weird video sequence and an incongruous rock song (“Heroin,” by the Velvet Underground—“I just don’t know”). When I saw the play, I was sitting next to an audience member who kept shifting his legs back and forth for the entire show. It was super annoying, but I could understand why he felt so anxious—van Hove seems to equate seriousness with slowness, and at times the play can start to feel a little ponderous. All the urgency in this production comes from Sophocles’s story and the actors’ performances—not the pacing.
All My Sons, as directed by Wendy Goldberg, is a little brighter on the surface than Antigone—the set (by Caleb Levengood) looks like a picture postcard, with a slightly shabby Middle-American house framed by little Rockwellian tchotchkes decorating the proscenium. For the first few minutes of All My Sons, the dialogue is mostly composed of small-town small talk, but as the audience is introduced to the various members of the Keller family—the businessman father who built planes in World War II, the veteran son who’s engaged to be married, the dreamy mother who keeps hoping her other son will return home someday—the happy image slowly unravels and the Kellers are shown to be a family broken by the foolish mistake of one man.
Despite the fact that most of the student actors were playing roles several decades beyond their years, they all gave a variety of beautiful and subtle performances—from Benjamin Reitemeier’s lovable but deluded old patriarch, to Eric Myrick’s kindly old doctor, to Jordan Rich’s reluctant bearer of very bad news—but the standout was Regan Moro in the role of the mother, Kate Keller. On paper, the role of Kate can come across as a showy, theatrical crazy-lady role, but Moro played her as a decent woman, buckling under the strain of holding a family together with determined denial. Goldberg has staged the play in the round, which means that sometimes the character’s back is to the audience. Even then, I couldn’t take my eyes off Kate Keckler—more accurately, I couldn’t look away.
For all their thematic similarities, there are obvious differences between these two productions. All My Sons is a student production, while Antigone is performed by a professional company of older, more experienced actors. All My Sons is being staged, naturally, in the Arthur Miller Theatre, a cozy, intimate space. Antigone is performed in the cavernous Power Center. I was fortunate enough to be seated in the second row for Antigone, but somehow I never felt fully drawn into the drama. The Greek tragedies were originally performed for religious ceremonies—perhaps the ideal audience is an audience of gods, not mere mortals. I felt distanced from Antigone, like it was somehow beyond my grasp. On the other hand, Goldberg’s production of All My Sons felt down-to-earth, specific, and real. The play has the structure of Greek tragedy—a well-renowned man commits a grave offense and is forced to pay the price for his actions—but the Kellers are not lofty, kingly figures. They are ordinary people, and their ordinariness is what makes their tragedy so terrifying.
Still, there were moments in Antigone that I’ll never forget—like when Antigone silently buried her brother. Or when Antigone’s sister Ismene (played with shifting shades of tenderness and harshness by Kirsty Bushell), praying to Bacchus, shrieked the words “Grant us light!” Or when Binoche, as the Chorus, sat at the lip of the stage, simply telling the story to a handful of people in the front row. These moments could have been already forgotten by everybody else in the audience, but I’ll probably remember them for a very, very long time. Maybe that’s why we go to see these intense, serious shows—not to feel good, necessarily, but to walk away with a few unforgettable moments.
