The Burial at Thebes

Guthrie Theater

Minneapolis

(612) 377-2224

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The ancient Greek playwrights “found immortality by reminding us what makes us inescapably mortal,” said Rob Hubbard in the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press. That’s why, while Sophocles’ Anti­gone has a simple premise, it speaks volumes about the limits of state authority. In 2004, Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney adapted the tragedy, undoubtedly thinking that the modern world “needed a refresher on lessons offered millennia ago.” He shifted the focus to King Creon, who stubbornly decrees that Antigone’s deceased brother be left to rot even when “all around him warn of grim consequences.” If only director Marcela Lorca could bring the rest of the characters to life as vividly as Stephen Yoakam does Creon. Instead, this static production “misses opportunities to resonate as deeply as it could.”

Even so, the story remains deeply thought-provoking, said Graydon Royce in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Sun Mee Chomet is a somewhat shrill Antigone, but she offers a useful foil to Yoakam’s Creon, who, brutal as he is, “flinches ever so slightly with doubt” when Antigone challenges his authority. The contrast awakens something uncomfortable in us—“our disturbing instinct to see things both ways.” Is it possible, one wonders, that the pious Antigone would insist that the United States unjustifiably put state interests above individual rights when it recently assassinated a radical cleric and U.S. citizen living in Yemen? The strength in this production lies in its use of ancient words to “unlock thoughts and reactions in our own minds, however unsettling that might be.”