Players' `Antigone': two-hour tour of modern issues

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by Amy McKay

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The story, written by A.R. Gurney, is set in a Boston university shortly before graduation.

The setting ties in directly with the plot and the four characters -- a classics professor, one of his students, the student's boyfriend and the dean of the department.

The play opens as the Greek tragedy professor is refusing to grade his student Judy's term paper, a modern rewrite of Antigone .

In Judy's version, the dead brother is replaced by the whole world in a struggle against Creon, who has been replaced by nuclear arms. The professor, Henry Harper (Duke York), claims the paper does not show adequate knowledge of Sophocles play and Greek tragedy as a whole.

This fiery student, played by Courtney Kneupper, believes her play is good -- so good, in fact, that she intends to produce it on the weekend of graduation. But the erudite professor will not budge. The dean of the department (Natalie Kirilcuk) tries to fight on both sides and thickens the conflict by pointing out that few people enroll in in Harper's class, and that Judy needs to pass in order to graduate with her peers.

Ever so slowly the significance of this somewhat petty conflict becomes clear. Judy is fighting against the dictates of society.

Brought up in a "white-bread, middle-class American" lifestyle, she has always lived according to other people's rules and strived for other people's dreams. She is beginning to question everything -- does she really want to work her way through graduate school and then up the corporate ladder to earn a bigger office with a better view? Aren't there more important issues in life?

Her boyfriend Dave (Thomas Fowlkes) is having similar doubts, although Gurney does not take the time to really explore Dave's personality. About to graduate with a chemistry degree, his passion for the classics becomes increasingly important to him. His love for Judy puts his impending graduation in jeopardy, although on stage their love seems distractingly unnatural.

Meanwhile, the professor and the dean are having their own respective mid-life crises. Harper blames his low class enrollment on the MTV generation despite accusations of anti-semitism, while his love for teaching tragedy is heightened by his wife's leaving him with nothing in his tragic life but his work.

The newly promoted dean is also unhappy in her position, and Harper accuses her of having lobbied for the position "to make some kind of feminist statement." In an impassioned -- though plot-irrelevant -- speech she tells him that he doesn't even know her. The speech seems like only an attempt by Gurney to give depth to this liaison character.

The play makes several interesting points. The central theme is the apparent chasm between what modern society thinks of as important -- money, prestige, a happy family -- and what, the characters would say, really is important: pride and one's true passions. It is pride which "leads to tragedy every time."

However, the play makes this point in too many ways, and worse, makes too many points, lessening the play's overall impact. No two-hour production can successfully tackle anti-semitism, feminism, nuclear disarmament, the MTV generation and whether or not "our country is worth dying for."

The author is overly ambitious, as are the Rice Players. With the exception of Duke York, who plays a wonderfully theatrical and devoted teacher reaching the edge, the acting is only fair, and is sometimes distracting to someone intent on the meaning of the play itself.

Kirilcuk is too sweet and youthful to convincingly portray a harried college dean, and Kneupper and Fowlkes appear ill at ease with their characters -- although Kneupper does well with Judy's vehement monologues.

But the actors, under the direction of Amy Hemphill, had an almost impossible job, forced to meet the high aims of a script which can't reach such heights on its own merits. Judy says to Harper, "We both see too big a picture." So did this playwright.

Another Antigone is a very intellectual drama, and the parallels to Antigone are definitely thought-provoking. Unfortunately, its reach exceeds its grasp.

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the March 18, 1994 issue.

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