‘Antigone’ Off Broadway Review: Tony Shalhoub and Susannah Perkins Deliver a New, Explosive Update

Because Antigone buries her dead brother, Creon sentences her to death. That brother, Polynices, is not even mentioned by name in Anna Ziegler’s provocative play “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School),” which opened Wednesday at the Public Theater. This wild, new Antigone even goes so far as to complain about the Zophocles original: “[It’s] not even about her. It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.”

Ziegler isn’t writing about what to do with a dead body. She’s writing about what to do with an unborn body and what right the state possesses to control a woman’s body. Sophocles’ Antigone proclaims the superiority of divine law to human law, and, likewise, Ziegler’s Antigone makes the case that the health of the human body is superior to the body of the political state.

There’s a creepy fascination to a lot of Greek tragedy: the incest in “Oedipus,” the rotting corpse in “Antigone.” It may be a bit disappointing to learn that Ziegler tackles what seems to be a less ghoulish topic. Tyne Rafael’s direction handles that possible regret by immediately flipping our perceptions of Antigone and Creon: Susannah Perkins is edgy and threatening in the title role, and Tony Shalhoub is sweet and very relatable in his take on the tyrant-king, who isn’t all that far removed from the actor’s Adrian Monk. What Ziegler makes clear is that weak rulers need unjust laws to maintain their power. Here, Shalhoub reeks weakness.

Perkins’ performance is something else entirely. This Antigone’s fierce independence and unpredictability is her strength, and it’s there right at the top of Ziegler’s play when Antigone picks up Achilles (Ethan Dubin) at a local bar in Thebes and dumps her faster than any man Samantha screwed in “Sex and the City.”

Haemon, Antigone’s fiancé, is very much the son of Shalhoub’s Creon, and Calvin Leon Smith plays him with enormous charm. Antigone tells Haemon that she’s pregnant, and Haemon is thrilled. Antigone has other plans. Abortion is illegal in Thebes but accessible through a back alley abortionist (Katie Kreisler, being lethally good in the role).

Playing the Chorus, Celia Keenan-Bolger narrates “Antigone” in a role that could more accurately be called the Author. It is she who read Sophocles’ tragedy in high school, a revelation she delivers as if everyone had read “Antigone,” much less in high school. She now finds herself pregnant.

There are a lot of speeches in Ziegler’s play, many of them laced with a subversive contemporary wit and a bracing grip on what it means to give birth or not. Her “Antigone” doesn’t have the ghoulish fascination of the original; however, as depicted here, birth and abortion can be far more scary. The play ends with Keenan-Bolger and Perkins in a tight embrace, one that excludes men — even a good-guy like Smith’s Haemon. Men are mere bystanders here.

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