by Anne Carson
New York University | Gallatin School | 2013
A staged reading with
Anne Carson (Chorus), Judith Butler (Kreon), Anne Waldman (Tiresias), Beth Pollack (Antigone), Denis Butkus (Haemon), Emily Young (Ismene), Paul Coffey (Guard) and Laura Slatkin (Eurydice)
followed by
A conversation: “Antigone Now” with
Judith Butler, Anne Carson, Robert Currie, A.B. Huber, Emanuela Bianchi and Jacques Lezra. Moderated by Laura Slatkin
“The NYU Antigonick rendered the “Antigone experience” visceral and immediate. Without choreography (save for the wandering Nick) or sets (just chairs and mikes), the drama’s speeches became its primary form of action. As someone in the discussion observed, there was an eerie moment of group response when the sentence “It’s Friday afternoon” was spoken. The audience reaction was communal recognition of the amusing coincidence of it actually being a Friday, one particular Friday afternoon in the winter of 2013. But following the chuckle came a certain awareness that “time” had lost its familiar outlines, so that we were simultaneously in the imagined past of the play’s setting; the moment of its adaptation by Carson; as well as in the dated present of its performance. “There goes Antigone to be buried alive”: Theatrically speaking we were momentarily transported to the metaphysical dimension of “mythic time,” the unclocked dimension of tragedy—a place where “Before and After,” as Lincoln Kirstein put it, “are loose concepts in relation to an Order which permanently is.” – Mary Maxwell, “Questions and Comments from the Audience,” Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013)
Co-sponsored by Gallatin’s Classics and the Contemporary Series; NYU Department of Comparative Literature; NYU Humanities Initiative