The Antigone Project

Venue

Free Event

Please RSVP through the link provided. The event Zoom link will be distributed via email, and available to registered attendees starting 2 days prior to the event.

Sun, Nov 07.2021 7:00 PM

Virtual Event

This presentation of The Oedipus Project is part of a series of events accompanying the release of Bryan Doerries' translations of Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy: Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. We encourage our audience to attend all three events and engage in the story of an intergenerational curse passing through a single family, tracing an arc from early childhood trauma to familial and societal collapse.

We are proud to collaborate with The On Being Project on this series and very exited that this event will be introduced by Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the Poetry Unbound podcast.

About the play

Antigone by Sophocles

Sophocles’ Antigone is an ancient play about a teenage girl who wishes to bury her brother, Polyneices, who recently died in a brutal civil war. Creon, the new, untested king, has ruled that Polyneices’ body must remain above the earth, and that anyone who breaks this law will be put to death. Antigone openly and intentionally defies his edict, covering her brother’s body with dirt and publicly declaring her allegiance to a higher law, one that transcends that of the state—the law of love. Creon is then forced, by his own political rhetoric, and the by fragile social order that he has barely begun to establish since the civil war, to make an example of his niece, by sentencing her to death. In the process of following through with his own decree, Creon loses everything. At its core, Antigone is a play about what happens when personal conviction and state law clash, raising the question: When everyone is right (or feels justified), how do we avert the violence that will inevitably take place?