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Tlab Shares
Antigonē: A Play Against Birth
Theatre of the Bacchant
Thursday, July 17, 2025 at 7:30PM
Theaterlab
357 West 36th Street 3rd Floor
New York,
NY
10018
Antigonē: A Play Against Birth, is a 90 minute theatrical remounting of Sophokles’ Antigone,
newly translated by playwright and classicist, Lane St. Sebastian.
Sophokles’s Antigone
recounts the conflict between Thebes’s new king, Kreon, and his teenage niece, Antigone, over the burial of Antigone’s brother, Polyneikes, who incited a civil war within the Theban state.
With Polyneikes’s burial banned, Antigone violates the law to justly honor her dead brother,
leading to her execution and the subsequent suicide of Kreon’s son, Haimon. This translation and production strives to inject a queer/transgender perspective into this ancient story, evoking the themes of stripped bodily autonomy by an autocratic state and personal rebellion by theindividual through its reinterpretation. Each character’s speech is translated in a different linguistic style, spiraling from Antigone’s poetic free-verse, to Kreon’s American Realism, the Chorus’s iambic pentameter, and Teiresias’s ancient Greek itself. Polyneikes’s body— the source of strife within the story— remains on stage for the entire 90 minutes, forcing the audience to constantly confront the conflict of the show with no escape. The production itself is sparsely designed, highlighting instead the language of the new translation and the emotions behind each character’s motivations.
Directed by Kaila Tacazon and produced by Theatre of the Bacchant, this production will bring QTBIPOC to the forefront of classics through its cast
and production team, thus recasting the famous ancient Greek narrative of Antigone into a
direct commentary on our current American political conflicts. We aim to ask our audience:
Who, in our current society, is denied their humanity by an unyielding state? And who are the
ones forced to speak for those without voices?
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