Antigone in the Amazon

“There are many monstrous things, but none more monstrous than man.”

When Antigone in the Amazon begins with this line, we are immediately pulled into a realm of existential questions. Into the heart of a reckoning. Like the fabled, but never believed, Cassandra, Antigone lands with fire in her hands, and she pulls no punches.

Developed over the course of several years, Antigone in the Amazon presents a world in constant crisis and calamity. Director Bartlett Scher said once that he abhors the idea of directors as “world builders,” feeling that their job is to create an engine that serves the play, but in this case, Swiss director Milo Rau’s world building is the play. And the play he’s building is about worlds that are never quite right, where time moves against us and where we move against each other. In this world, it is always too late. Under capitalism and colonialism and a police state, there are no good choices and there is never a good time.

In April of 1996, violence shattered a protest on private land lead by the Landless Workers Movement (MST). 19 people were killed by military police, while scores more were left injured. Their battered and bruised bodies become Polyneices’ body. Antigone is played Indigenous actor Kay Sara on screen (during video sequences), and by Frederico Araujo on stage. Arne De Tremerie and Sara De Bosschere are Haimon and Creon respectively, giving voice to the white gaze, the white ally and power structures that have created this ecological crisis. A choir of actors and activists and survivors air their grievances and reenact the original massacre on film.

Rau weaves these pasts and presents adroitly, reveling in contrast: the cool distance created by the three projection screens versus the dirt floor on stage, live performance versus filmed performances, the so-called Old World and the New. Although Rau’s project is about land and community and resistance in the face of oppression, it is deeply obsessed with the Atlantic gap between Europe and the Americas and the blood that still flows as a result of this meeting. His diligence to this end is palpable. By the close of the piece, when we are confronted with the dichotomy between brutality and humanity, white violence and brown uprisings, Antigone and Creon, it seems that Rau has made his point. To quote the New York Times, “You can’t say… Rau doesn’t practice what he preaches.”

But one question remains for me: what to do about the grief?

When I watch Antigone in the Amazon, I begin to feel that Antigone is a story about mourning. What happens when people are not allowed to mourn, when grief festers in a body, in a family, in a nation. Death comes to us for granted in the Greeks. So much so that it has taken me about two weeks to fully digest that Antigone has lost both of her parents and both of her brothers by the time the events of her own tragedy take place. Creon and Antigone have their philosophical exchanges, of course—never miss a chance for a dialectic, these Greek playwrights—but I imagine they are underwritten with a raw sense of loss. A city gone mad with absences, civil war. One thing our tragedians got right: when it falls apart, it all falls apart. 

Gazing into the abyss that Rau has summoned in front of our eyes, I think, “The dream of the Western world is ending.” This 400 year old dream, built on the backs of enslaved people, women, and ill-gotten land is ending. And I feel relieved. But I wonder if any of us have faced what this means, have grappled with what will come after we wake up from our collective colonial nightmare. Perhaps, Antigone warns us that when the crisis cannot be averted and is already upon us, the conflict will come in the form of narrative, of who gets to lay claim over grief, over the dead bodies. Whose grief will matter more? Whose grief already matters more?

Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” As I watch the theatergoers around me chap their hands with round after round of curtain calls, two thoughts occur. One is that applause is currency for the bravery we have witnessed on stage and screen that we have no idea how to repay. It is applause as solidarity. But, maybe, the second thought says, it’s also about guilt. Applause is meant to drown out the sound of the abyss. The applause assures us that this is just a show and “Wow, wasn’t the acting marvelous?” We applaud to assuage our guilt, to cover up our own monstrosity, to paper over the ugliness of history. We want to forget what we’ve seen and slink back into our Ubers and grocery stores and our comforts, but Antigone lingers like the perfume of someone you know you’ve seen somewhere, but can’t place.

On video, Brazil looms large and green like a dream of an alien world. Far away. Unreachable. But Brazil is here in that is a place where many beautiful and terrible things happen all at once and sometimes because of each other. It is also here in that we too have not yet decided if we are monsters or not. I wander the streets near Skirball after the performance and am overwhelmed by the sounds of a DJ playing “Double Dutch Bus”, drunk college students looking for thrills, and tourists walking very slowly, talking very loudly. An urban jungle in motion. What can Antigone say to these people? What is it saying to me? I think of Ismêne, who is not the firebrand, nor the inflexible ruler. She is practical. And more importantly, she survives. I would like to think that Ismêne gets to write Antigone’s story and Creon’s and Haimon’s. And in this way, it seems that Rau is pointing to the vitality of theater for survivors to make sense of their history, thus giving us all permission to reflect on what we have survived and how we can shape our future beyond the auspices of tragedy.

Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.