In Our Time : Antigone
The BBC’s In Our Time takes up Sophocles’s Antigone in an episode that makes an excellent introduction to the play.
Lee Breuer (1937–2021)
Among his accomplishments: The Gospel at Colonus, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus.
Theater of War via Zoom
Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Mothers of the Movement.
Greek tragedy and Theater of War
In The New Yorker, Elif Batuman writes about Greek tragedy and Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War.
Theater of War, tomorrow
A Theater of War event for frontline medical providers, with scenes from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis.
Antigone in Ferguson
Many overtones of Lee Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus, with a message of healing and redemption added to Sophoclean tragedy.
“Art is fierce”
“The play they were performing was Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy about the moral and fatal consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead.”
Ajax and EMTs
I’ve begun to think of Ajax as a quintessential essential worker.
Ajax for frontline medical providers
A Theater of War event for frontline medical providers, open to the public.
Antigone in Ferguson
Online, from Theater of War.
The Oedipus Project
“Arrogant leadership, ignored prophecy, and a pestilence”: Theater of War has created The Oedipus Project, a staged reading (via Zoom) of scenes from Sophocles’s Oedipus.
Victor Davis Hanson on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump
Comparing Trump to Ajax or Achilles: bonkers. If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”
Clarence Fountain (1929–2018)
One small sample of Clarence Fountain’s voice that’s dear to me: “Stop Do Not Go On.”
We three kings
Donald Trump reminds me of three kings, or one king and two tyrants, really: Agamemnon, Oedipus, Creon.
Veterans read from Sophocles
From Ajax and Philoctetes.
Ownlife
From Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Word of the day: tyrant
Our president-elect appears to possess the traits of both Platonic and theatrical tyrants.
Antigone in Ferguson
Whatever the fate of Sophocles and other representatives of “western civ” in academia, their work remains perpetually relevant to human suffering and human endeavor.
“Not yet, son of Poeas!”
A blackboard drawing, the work of my student Hannah Isabel Gay.
Sophocles and the news
A strange time to be teaching Ajax.
Damn you, Dictation
“Edifice will die a hero’s death, endowed by the gods with powers to Courson Blatz.”
War, soldiers, trauma
Warrior Transition Units and what Sophocles can teach us
Patients like Philoctetes
A model for patient care, found in a Sophocles play
Britney Spears and Sophocles
A sample of her writing