Watch this trailer created by Peter Ruocco for the Shotgun Players production, featuring interviews as well as rehearsal and production footage.
“Shotgun Players’ incendiary production of Antigonick is an intensely felt, richly inventive and resonant show… One of the most impressive productions of the year… Jackson, an inventive director with a penchant for expressive physical interpretations of texts, and Hope Mohr, best known as a choreographer, fill the stage with endlessly intriguing, propulsive and slowly evolving movement patterns… Vital and immediate…”
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“This enigmatic 75-minute production revels in Anne Carson's lean and muscular poetry. Codirected by stage auteur Mark Jackson and choreographer Hope Mohr, this postmodern stab at the ancient Greek tragedy is framed by almost trancelike movement that builds to eerie tableaux… Uncompromising physicality… Alternately hypnotic and impenetrable... Gutsy... Unsettling and memorable…”
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
“It’s a museum piece come to life, a poem that dances, a classic that feels ultra-modern. Shotgun Players’ Antigonick is all that and more... This is rigorous, grueling theater… Bold, kinetic performances that electrify the fragmented storytelling… As grand art, Antigonick succeeds mightily. It feels bold, fresh, challenging and incisively crafted.”
THEATERDOGS.NET
“As rendered by Shotgun veteran Mark Jackson and choreographer Hope Mohr, the play uses tense, minimal strokes that erupt into a grand ferocity… a ritual that becomes astonishing through precision, repetition, and speed.”
SF WEEKLY
“There’s almost nothing that isn’t interesting, at times fascinating, about Shotgun Players’ dance-infused production of Antigonick… Carefully detailed direction by Mark Jackson and choreographer Hope Mohr physicalize the story in equally compelling, wonderfully theatrical ways… Suspenseful and intriguing…”
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
“Extremely confrontational... A fascinating look at an ancient tale whose treatise on justice as opposed to law still rings true today.”
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
“Shotgun Players’ stylized Antigonick makes a triumph of tragedy… A spellbinding piece of dance theater… Jackson and Mohr’s production is full of magical moments… Much of it may be puzzling on a literal level, but what’s remarkable is how well it all works on a visceral one. If we learn nothing else from Antigone, it’s that sometimes you have to break all the rules to do what feels right, and this Antigonick does that magnificently.”
KQED.ORG
“The language and the movement and the thought are allowed to sweep over the audience like an ocean wave. The experience is one of being overwhelmed and carried by a flood of emotion and intellectual stimulation… This all makes for unusual, exceptional and quite challenging theatre… This highly stylized, challenging, virtuosic piece of ensemble theatre and dance is hard to describe but easy to assess: it is quite excellent. Highly recommended.”
THEATRESTORM.COM
"What's amazing is how co-directors Mark Jackson and Hope Mohr managed to faithfully transform Carson's very visual book into a compelling play."
EAST BAY EXPRESS
"This is cutting edge drama at its best, skillfully spare and energetically compact."
-TALKINBROADWAY.COM
Watch this short teaser created by Peter Ruocco, featuring footage from rehearsals
When we say we need to give ourselves space to deal with something, often we’re saying we need time. Space and time are flip sides of the same coin. In presenting her radical translation, ANTIGONICK, in the form of an art book, Anne Carson invites us to take time to reconsider Sophokles’ well known characters. Through ANTIGONICK’s distinctive text (handwritten in all capital letters and surrounded by ample empty space) and paintings (on transparent vellum pages inserted seemingly by chance), Carson makes the format of her book as decisive an aspect of the script as the words. She compels us not only to listen to this ancient story, but also to see it. As a poet, Carson understands that a perfectly coherent narrative order simply cannot contain the chaos of the human experience. Full of interruption, ambiguity, and collage, ANTIGONICK offers a challenge and an invitation. It’s no longer possible to coast on expectation. It’s no longer easy to separate heroes from villains. Carson carves out a bit of space and time for us to consider alternative possibilities... Working on ANTIGONICK led us to think a great deal about integrity. If we measure a person’s integrity by the extent to which she puts her body on the line for her ideals, then of course Antigone wins our sympathy. But isn’t Kreon also throwing himself on the fire by wearing the new title of king—a title he never wanted—and trying to create order in the wake of a chaotic war he never supported and which took his children? Aren’t the Antigones and Kreons of the world strikingly similar in their unyielding, narrow-minded courage? Most of us are more like Ismene, Haimon, Eurydike, or the Messenger—teetering somewhere between the poles of Antigone and Kreon’s extremes. Who is right? Or as Antigone herself asks, Who suffers more? It isn’t so easy to say.