Sophocles' ANTIGONE to Open Wilma Theater's 2015-16 Season

The Wilma Theater is honored to welcome back Attis Theater Artistic Director Theodoros Terzopoulos (AJAX the madness, co-presented with FringeArts in 2013), who will lead eight Philadelphia actors and three Attis actors in creating an original adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone. This production, which Terzopoulos has adapted from an English translation by Marianne McDonald, merges a physically rigorous methodology with a classical text, and is performed in both English and ancient Greek by an international ensemble. A project initially inspired by a New Yorker essay about the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Antigone invites conversation around moral, religious, and political dilemmas regarding the unburied dead.

The story of Antigone begins years after the events depicted in Oedipus. Oedipus' sons, Polyneices and Eteocles, have just fought a war over who will rule Thebes. The battle is over, and both are dead. Their uncle, Creon, is the new king. He orders Eteocles buried with honors but decrees that Polyneices' body should be left for the birds to devour. Antigone, the dead brothers' sister, disobeys this order: she believes her duty to her brother is greater to her than her duty to her king. As Marianne McDonald, Sophocles translator and Professor of Theatre and Classics at the University of California, San Diego, describes, "Sophocles is the playwright of heroism, and Antigone is the first female character in drama to be a hero in the full sense of the word. She is the first conscientious objector. Both Antigone and Creon mourn the loss of those they love: one defends the unwritten laws of the gods, and Creon the laws of the state. Both are valid, but compromise is needed for a successful resolution. Antigone and Creon, as so many world leaders today, will not compromise. This is their tragedy on one hand and supposed triumph on the other."

Antigone also marks the inauguration of the Wilma HotHouse, an artist-centric approach to project development and advanced actor training that will allow artists to dare and explore under the Wilma's auspices. HotHouse Company actors will participate in all stages of the creation of Wilma work, performing in mainstage productions, including Antigone; participating in workshops; and helping further to develop and refine the Wilma's performance aesthetic.

Antigone begins on Wednesday, October 7, 2015; opens on Wednesday, October 14, 2015; and has been extended through Sunday, November 8, 2015 due to popular demand.

Critics and members of the press are invited to attend Press Night on Wednesday, October 14, at 7:30pm. For ticket arrangements, contact Sara Madden at smadden@wilmatheater.org or 215.893.9456 x102.

After The Wilma co-presented AJAX the madness with FringeArts in 2013, artistic directors Blanka Zizka and Theodoros Terzopoulos sought a way for The Wilma Theater and Attis Theatre to collaborate. They decided that the tragedy of Antigone, and the implications of its theme of unburied dead within modern political discourse, was an important piece to explore. This impulse to revisit timeless texts is a fundamental part of Terzopoulos' technique: as Terzopoulos explained in an Attis Theater workshop in 2014, which Blanka Zizka attended, "The most dangerous things-all the material of theater-we can find in the Greek tragedy. We have the lost traditions of our ancestors, the dissolved traditions of our fathers. There is violence in the art of theater, and through this work, this digging, we encounter an explosion of memory."

Antigone explores these nuances of memory and memorial as part of Terzopoulos' larger Unburied Bodies project, an international partnership between Attis Theatre and important theaters and creators from all over the world. The project was inaugurated at the Attis Theatre in Athens on May 30, 2015 with a four-hour event that featured 22 young poets, who presented poems that they had written especially on this subject.

While the Wilma's Antigone was adapted from Marianne McDonald's English translation of the text, the production will use both English and ancient Greek. Regardless of where and in what language Terzopoulos directs tragedies, his choruses always speak in the original ancient Greek, due to "the musicality of the verses, and also because of the exceptional relation between the vowels and the consonants." In this way, Terzopoulos uses his actors' bodies to explore language from the inside out, capturing its essences through physical movement and interaction between performers. "We go into this dark root of a scream; we will re-construct it," he explains. "We don't want to re-live the pain of the scream: it's not psychological, it's physiological, and we can use all these vowels to create melodies. How does someone lament? We can't lament if we stay in our brains. We have to give it up. We have to destroy these Berlin Walls."

While Terzopoulos has worked extensively with the production's Attis Theatre actors (Stathis Grapsas, Antonis Miriagos, and Paolo Musio), its Philadelphia actors are brand new to him. The American company was chosen after a two-week workshop with Terzopoulos in January 2015, and the seven-week rehearsal process will be both physically and vocally demanding: "we must break the fixed ideas, prisons, rules, and re-construct a new image," says Terzopoulos, "and actors have to have bodies that can be a material for these transformations. The body contains a whole new world."