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The University of SC Dept. of Theatre and Dance will open its 2024-2025 season with a production of the timeless classic Antigone, October 4-12 at historic Longstreet Theatre.
Show times are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, with additional 3 p.m. matinee performances on Sunday, October 6 and Saturday, October 12. Admission is $15 for students, $20 for USC faculty/staff, military, and seniors 60+, and $22 for the public. Tickets may be purchased online at sc.universitytickets.com. Longstreet Theatre is located at 1300 Greene St. Entry to the theatre is through the rear breezeway off Sumter St.
Written in the 5th Century BCE, this final chapter in Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy presents themes of equality and civil disobedience that are as relevant today as they were almost 2500 years ago. After Antigone’s two brothers are killed while fighting each other for the throne of Thebes, the kingdom’s new ruler, Creon, declares that only one brother will receive a proper burial, while the other will be left out to rot. In allegiance with her family – and honoring her own strong sense of morality – Antigone buries her brother in defiance of the law, setting in motion a chain of events that threaten to bring even more tragedy to the kingdom.
Lauren Wilson, an Assistant Professor in the theatre program, is directing the play from a 1938 translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.
“At its heart is the story of a young woman standing up to a world in which authoritarian power is trampling on basic human values and connection,” Wilson says. “But it’s also a story of a leader who goes toward that tyrannical direction and then through his own suffering comes to a place of compassion, empathy and feeling.”
Sophocles’ tale was partly a comment on politics in his own time, when the female-led ritual of public lamentations for the dead had become strictly curtailed by the government. “Sophocles, who was both a war general and a poet, identified with the perspective of those who were prohibited from expressing their grief,” Wilson explains, “and he was advocating for a sense of relational leadership as opposed to top-down leadership.”
The suppression of women’s voices in Sophocles’ story is a central theme in Wilson’s staging, as she has cast solely women in the story’s prominent Chorus, which fuses heightened movement and language to comment on and drive the action of the play.
“I think of them as one organism, but it just so happens that they have eight bodies that move together,” she says. “Essentially their job is to be a bridge for the audience into the emotional journey of the characters’ conflict, and that’s expressed through heightened dramatic movement. Sometimes they break into dance; sometimes they use the power of stillness; and sometimes their response is gestural and almost expressionist.”
“It’s not just decorative,” she adds. “It’s movement that comes out of all the things we look for in the theatre – intention, drive, need, and emotion.”
The production’s cast includes 2nd-year graduate acting students Elaine Werren (Antigone), Dominic DeLong-Rodgers (Creon), Olan Domer, Didem Ruhi, and Elizabeth Wheless; undergraduates Meagan AuBuchon, John Ballard, Eliza Dojan, Ben Doub, Mel Driggers, Ash Leland, Kyleigh McComish, Angie Tamvaki, Carlos Turner, and Olivia Wamai; and guest artist Talha Karci.
The show’s production design, which juxtaposes a contemporary aesthetic against the play’s heightened text, is by theatre faculty Andy Mills (scenic), Kristy Hall (costume), Jim Hunter (lighting), and Danielle Wilson (sound).
“There’s a quote from Kafka that says a story ‘should be an ax for the frozen sea inside us,’” Wilson says when asked about the relevance of Antigone to contemporary audiences. “All times are difficult and that’s true for our time also. But a play can crack that open so that where there has been numbness there can be feeling.”
“And if we’ve allowed ourselves to feel with other people in the theatre – and with these young people who are pouring their hearts into this play – then something has opened to us and life has expanded a little bit.”
For more information on Antigone or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, contact Kevin Bush by phone at 803-777-9353 or via email at bushk@mailbox.sc.edu.