This was the reason that the ancient Greeks turned to mythology as the material for their tragedies: when they had staged plays about contemporary events, it had proven too painful for the audience to watch.

Why not just write a play about the death of Michael Brown? Why turn to Antigone to explore this tragedy? Part of the answer must be that using myth allows us to explore extreme situations without risking the crassness of dramatizing the specific events of a young man’s death. It presents a rehearsed reading of an adaptation of Sophocles’s play, followed by a discussion, with community members, police officers, and activists, about social justice and race. Antigone in Ferguson was conceived by Bryan Doerries after the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown Jr. Today, it is performed all over the world since 2016, it has been staged, with a new purpose, in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York City.

She is vulnerable and terrorized, but she breaks the law anyway.Īntigone was first performed in Athens in (we think) 442 BCE. Antigone also challenges male authority, in the face of Creon’s insistence that women are inferior to men and that men should rule over them. Antigone, just a child of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, stands up to a powerful adult, even when her sister won’t and when the citizens of Thebes are too afraid to do so. Of speaking truth to power.Īntigone insists on burying her brother Polynices, who has been killed while fighting against her city, Thebes, even though her uncle Creon, who is ruler of Thebes, expressly forbids the burial and will impose the death penalty for her defiance. Of pitting personal conviction against state law. The myth of Antigone, as told by the Greek playwright Sophocles, is one of the most well known of the Greek myths and one of the most meaningful for feminism and for revolutionary politics. These can be limiting and destructive but also inspirational and liberating. They form the foundations and scaffolding of the beliefs that shape our politics and our lives. 2 The Greek and Roman myths have become embedded in, and an influential part of, our culture. What makes a myth a myth, rather than just a story, is that it has been told and retold over the centuries and has become meaningful to a culture or community. I still love the way that myths open up new ways of looking at the world.

I liked knowing that the eyes on the peacock’s tail are there because when a beloved giant of Hera, the queen of the gods, had been killed, she plucked out his hundred eyes and placed them, in tribute, on her favorite bird. No one does power and rebellion and love and loathing quite like the gods and mortals of ancient mythology. W HEN I WAS A GIRL I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO READ A BOOK called the Tales of the Greek Heroes. the old men of Thebes on Antigone in Sophocles’s Antigone Clearly the girl has a fierce spirit.… She does not yet know how to submit to bad circumstances.

Antigone Rising by Helen Morales