Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School),” currently at the Public Theater’s Barbaralee Theater, is not the Sophocles tragedy I taught in high school—but then again, neither is James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham” the Hamlet Shakespeare wrote. The difference is that Ijames trusts his reimagining enough to tell his story without constantly stopping to explain it. Ziegler does not. Where “Fat Ham” confidently transplants Hamlet to a Black Southern family cookout and lets the drama speak for itself, Ziegler wraps her reimagined Antigone in layers of meta-commentary, framing devices, and explanatory apparatus that suggest a playwright who doesn’t believe her own vision is strong enough to stand alone. There is a powerful ninety-minute play buried inside this overlong, overwritten production—but you would have to excavate it from beneath the Chorus’s constant narration to find it.

The core reimagining is sound, even urgent. Ziegler dispenses with Polynices’ burial entirely and focuses instead on Antigone’s unwanted pregnancy. When her uncle Creon assumes the throne and immediately outlaws abortion as part of his program to “restore Thebes,” Antigone defies him—not to honor divine law over civic law, as in Sophocles, but to claim sovereignty over her own body. The transposition works conceptually: if the original asks whether religious duty supersedes state authority, this version asks whether bodily autonomy supersedes state control. Both are questions about where ultimate authority resides when laws conflict with individual conscience.

The production’s most powerful moment proves the strength of this reimagining. Susannah Perkins, playing Antigone, stands before Tony Shalhoub’s Creon and catalogs her body part by part—”This is my bad ankle…This is a mole I’ve had since I was born…These are my breasts…This is my womb”—in an extended monologue that functions as both anatomical inventory and declaration of ownership. Perkins delivers it naked, literally and figuratively exposed, claiming each piece of herself as hers alone: “If there’s anything we have in this world, that’s it. Your own body is it.” The scene works because it trusts the confrontation, trusts the actors, trusts that the image of a woman defending her right to her own flesh against state power will land without explanation. It is theater, not lecture.

If the entire play operated at this level of confidence, “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” would justify its reimagining. The problem is that Ziegler does not trust these moments enough to let them carry the play. Instead, she wraps the drama in elaborate framing devices that constantly pull the audience out of the story to explain what we are watching and why it matters. Celia Keenan-Bolger plays the Chorus—except she is not really a Greek chorus in any traditional sense. She’s Dicey (short for Eurydice, we eventually learn), a forty-year-old theater worker from Pittsburgh who is pregnant and uncertain about whether to keep the baby. On a plane circling over her hometown, she encounters a teenager reading Antigone for high school English, and this prompts her to reimagine the ancient story through the lens of bodily autonomy and reproductive choice. The play then unfolds as Dicey’s fantasy, with Keenan-Bolger periodically stepping out of the action to remind us: “Remember me? Pregnant 40-year-old, flying to Pittsburgh.”

Keenan-Bolger is excellent in an impossible role, bringing warmth and intelligence to what amounts to an extended narration assignment. But the role itself is a symptom of Ziegler’s fundamental lack of trust. A confident adaptation would tell Antigone’s story in its new context and let the audience make the connections. This adaptation needs constant reassurance that we understand what we are seeing and why it is relevant to contemporary debates about reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and women’s silenced voices across history.

The final sequence epitomizes the problem. As Antigone dies from complications following her illegal abortion, Dicey goes into labor in present-day Pittsburgh. The staging intercuts the two women—ancient and modern, death and birth—until Dicey delivers a daughter she names Antigone, thereby completing the circle of women’s voices carrying across time. It is schematic, over-determined, and fundamentally unnecessary. We do not need the Pittsburgh hospital bed to understand that Antigone’s defiance resonates across centuries. We certainly do not need Keenan-Bolger to explain the Eurydice/Dicey etymology (“wide justice”) to grasp that the play is arguing for women’s freedom. The drama should raise these questions; instead, the Chorus narrates them.

The overwriting problem extends beyond the Chorus apparatus. The production runs two hours and fifteen minutes with intermission—far too long for material that could work as a taut ninety-minute tragedy. The abortion clinic scene, where Antigone encounters the Proprietor who immediately recognizes her and attempts blackmail, drags through repetitive dialogue about anesthesia shortages and cash payments. The scene’s function is clear enough in half the time: Antigone will risk her life to reclaim control of her body. We do not need the extended negotiation.

Even more problematic are the palace guard scenes, where three cops with thick Boston accents deliver overlapping dialogue in a style that might charitably be called Keystone Kops meets absurdist comedy. They riff on phalanges (both the military formation and the bones in fingers), they argue about accuracy in crowd-sourced reporting, they perform elaborate physical demonstrations of how quiet they can be. The scenes aim for comic relief but achieve something closer to sketch comedy intrusion. Worse, they do not earn their late-play payoff: the revelation that one of the guards is actually a woman. The gender reveal lands with a thud because the preceding scenes have been too busy being clever to establish why this moment should matter.

Strip away the Chorus framing, tighten the clinic scene, cut the cop routines to their narrative essentials, and you would have a focused ninety-minute play that trusts its own dramatic power. Instead, we get a production that keeps stopping to explain, embellish, and reassure us that what we are watching is important.

What makes the production’s failures more frustrating is that the cast is uniformly excellent. Susannah Perkins brings fierce intelligence and emotional clarity to Antigone, embodying the character’s refusal to let state power supersede individual conscience. She makes Antigone’s defiance feel like character rather than platform—a young woman who has internalized the trauma of discovering her parents’ incestuous relationship and cannot bear to pass along what she experiences as contamination. Perkins never condescends to the material; she finds the person underneath the politics.

Tony Shalhoub plays Creon as genuinely conflicted rather than tyrannical. This Creon loves Antigone, grieves his sister Jocasta, treasures his son Haemon—but believes the abstraction of “the state” must take precedence over the people he loves. Shalhoub makes visible Creon’s terror of failure, his conviction that enforcing every law (even the unjust ones) is the only way to prove himself worthy of the crown. When he tells Antigone “You’re not wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Because also I am not wrong. And there is our tragedy: two truths, writhing on their slab of stone,” Shalhoub delivers it not as philosophical observation but as genuine anguish. He is a bookish man who loves finely woven rugs and Bach’s violin sonatas, forced into a role he never wanted and making catastrophic choices because he cannot see any alternative.

Calvin Leon Smith gives Haemon depth and specificity, playing him as a man deeply in love with his fiancée but fundamentally unable to understand her need for bodily autonomy over their shared future. Smith makes Haemon’s pain real—this is someone who can forgive Antigone anything except her refusal to choose the life he has imagined for them. The moment when Haemon describes their fantasy future (the island, the ferryboat, the deli sandwiches, the red buckets that babies fill with mud) and Antigone realizes “I can’t” becomes genuinely heartbreaking because Smith has made us believe in Haemon’s vision even as we understand why Antigone must reject it.

These performances prove that skilled actors can find truth even in overwritten material. But they also make clear that the problem is not execution—it is conception. Everyone is doing their job well. The script will not let them succeed.

The same paradox applies to the creative team. David Zinn’s scenic design is bare and expansive, allowing the action to move fluidly between ancient Thebes, contemporary Pittsburgh, and the liminal spaces of Dicey’s imagination. Jen Schriever’s lighting and Daniel Kluger’s sound design give the production appropriate depth and weight, underscoring the material’s urgency without overwhelming it. Tyne Rafaeli’s direction is careful and astute, giving the actors the space they need to create their characters while supporting Ziegler’s narrative choices—including the ones that do not work.

This is professional theater operating at a high level of craft. Everyone has done their job well. Which only makes the script’s problems more glaring. No amount of smart design or thoughtful direction can fix a playwright who does not trust her own vision enough to let the drama speak for itself. The creative team has built the world Ziegler imagined. The question is whether Ziegler imagined the right world in the first place.

The questions Ziegler raises are essential and urgent. Does individual conscience supersede state power when it comes to bodily autonomy? Can laws written by men and enforced on women’s bodies ever be just? What does it cost to refuse to be silenced? When love requires understanding someone’s need for freedom over your vision of their future, can that gap be bridged? These are precisely the questions a post-Roe reimagining of Antigone should ask. They matter now in ways that make the choice to adapt this particular Greek tragedy feel not just relevant but necessary.

But a play should not explain its enduring questions—it should raise them through drama, through conflict, through the collision of irreconcilable positions embodied by specific people in impossible situations. The moments when this production achieves that—Perkins naked before Shalhoub, Smith’s Haemon unable to bridge the gap between love and understanding—demonstrate what the play could be. A confident reimagining would trust those moments and build the entire play around them.

Instead, we get the Chorus telling us about legacy, memory, and inheritance. We get the birth/death parallel spelling out that women’s voices carry across time. We get Dicey explaining that she is naming her daughter Antigone because of a play she read in high school. James Ijames did not need to explain that “Fat Ham” was about cycles of violence and Black masculinity and choosing life over revenge—he trusted his reimagining enough to tell the story and let the questions emerge. Ziegler does not extend us the same courtesy.

There is a powerful ninety-minute play about bodily autonomy and state power buried inside “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School).” The cast is uniformly excellent. The creative team serves the material with intelligence and craft. But you would have to excavate that play from beneath layers of explanation, unnecessary scenes, and a framing device that constantly reminds you that you are watching a reimagining rather than just letting you experience one. My high school students understood that when you adapt a classic, you trust your vision enough to stand on its own. They wrote a Valley Girl Ophelia scene that was brilliant precisely because it committed fully to its conceit. Anna Ziegler needed to commit fully to hers—and then get out of the way.