In Anna Ziegler's Antigone, the Heroine Meets Her Reader

"From our millennia-later perspective, it's also remarkable that a culture that didn't count women as citizens - or even, truly, as full people; Aeschylus's Oresteia turns on the divine judgment that a mother isn't really a parent to her child but simply a vessel for the male's seed - created such staggering expressions of female wrath and righteousness on its stages."

"In Ziegler's shudderingly intense Antigone, a diffident present-day narrator named Dicey starts things off by admitting that she's felt unable to shake the heroine of Sophocles's play ever since tenth-grade English. 'It was ... confusing,' says Dicey. 'I mean, here was this girl who says whatever she wants, whenever she wants, even on pain of death, while I couldn't raise my hand to ask to go to the bathroom.'"

"Antigone, Dicey explains to us, keeps finding her - keeps shaming her with her audacity. In a college course, 'on a bad date in a cramped theater,' finally in the hands of a teenager reading the play across from her on a plane, the stubborn Greek princess shows up again and again."

Ancient Greek tragic playwrights created works of extraordinary scope addressing human rage, complicity, and moral crises that resonate across millennia. Paradoxically, Athens—a society that denied women full citizenship and personhood—produced powerful theatrical expressions of female wrath and righteousness. This contradiction underscores why Greek drama endures: it grapples with fundamental questions about human dignity and justice that remain unresolved. Contemporary playwright Anna Ziegler's adaptation of Sophocles's Antigone demonstrates this lasting power through a modern narrator who has been haunted by the heroine's fearless defiance since high school. The play explores how Antigone's willingness to speak truth regardless of consequences continues to challenge and inspire those constrained by social conformity and fear.

Read at Vulture