Based on Sophocles' 441 BCE play, Antigone, Antigone 2054 explores a not-too-distant-future in which Artificial Intelligence has taken over society. Programmed by Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, the AI learning-machine has taken on a life of its own, was elected to office and now deems itself "The Leader." In an effort to end the chaos, war, division, and injustice of our present day, The Leader aims to make everyone "perfect" based on their algorithm and anyone deemed "not-perfect" is subject to being rebooted, killed, or worse... taken off server.

A brave young woman, Antigone, must finish the work started by her father, Oedipus, and her brother, Polynices, to end The Leader's control once and for all. But first, she has to learn about her past, understand her present, and risk her future to do so.

Will Antigone free the world? Will she end up another slave to The Leader? Or was it all just a dream? Find out in Antigone 2054.

This show was conceived, devised, and written by students in THEA 121, Spring 2024.

Program Note:

In 441 BCE the great Greek master, Sophocles, brought Antigone to the stage at the Festival of Dionysus.  Historians don’t know how well the play did in the tragedy competition, but they do know that after its premiere Sophocles was promoted to General in the Greek army.  Suffice to say, the play was successful then, and has remained a staple in theatres and classrooms all over world in the almost 2500 years since. 

Why? 

Antigone is, at its core, the story of young woman who, when faced with the choice of obeying the laws of a brutal (if complex) dictator—or eschewing his edicts and upholding the laws of family, nature, and of the Gods, bravely and without apology chooses the latter. 

It is a story about the power of civil disobedience, protest, rebellion, and revolution. 

It is a story which has been told in innumerable ways by a plethora of writers over two and a half millennia. 

As part of this devised project, the students read and studied Sophocles’ original Antigone and then four adaptions of the play written at distinct times and places in the 20th and 21st centuries.  You can see the Word Cloud they created for each of the plays in our lobby display.   

They read Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, written and performed during the height of the Nazi occupation of France, where Creon is a brutal leader, but only because he is terrified of what “they” might do if he doesn’t uphold “their” laws.  The critique was so subtle that Nazis in the audience loved the play… as did members of the French Resistance, each taking from it what they wanted to see. 

The students read The Island, a devised piece by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, which takes place during South African Apartheid on Robben Island Prison.  In The Island, we see John and Winston devising their own performance of Antigone as a protest to their political persecution as activists who burned their passbooks during anti-apartheid protests. 

They wrestled with Griselda Gambaro’s Antigona Furiosa, a play in which Antigone is caged and mocked by the two male actors onstage (who play all the other roles) while she tries desperately to find and bury the body of her brother and all those who have been lost.  Written after the Argentinian Dirty War, this text evokes the activist movement Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo who advocated vociferously for the Argentine government to investigate the over thirty thousand disappearances during that conflict. 

Finally, they read Antigone by Ho Ka Kei, a Canadian and Chinese (Hong Kong) playwright, who situates his characters in a world which evokes both the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989 and the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong protesting the Chinese government. 

There are more adaptations of this story in plays, film, television, books, operas, and graphic novels than any one person could read in a lifetime… and they keep coming. 

Why this story?  Why this woman?  Why are we still, as citizens of the world, having to ask the same questions about authority, justice, and human nature as Sophocles did in 441bce? 

Our Antigone-story, AntIgone, 2054, hopes to offer not answers, but more questions. 

At a time when fascism in America is on the rise, peaceful protesters are being arrested en masse, and democracy seems to hang precariously in the balance, we evoke the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who wrote in 1963 “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” 

Thank you for pondering these questions with us today. 

Dr. Erin Rachel Kaplan 

McKayden Davis, Jayden Blakely, Astrid Ocampo, Carlos Martinez-Pascual, Damian Nickel, Isabella Castanon, Kimberly Aguilar, Cece Monson, Brandon Loera, Dream Hudson

Zachary Dart

DIRECTOR- Dr. Erin Rachel Kaplan
STAGE MANAGER- Serafina Bringino
SOUND DESIGN- Touissant LaBrie
SET DESIGN- Katie Alba with Stephen Jones & E.J. Reginald
LIGHTING DESIGN- Katie Alba & Alina Blanco
FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY- Jarod Wiggins
COSTUME DESIGNER- Alex Martinez
PHOTOS BY: Charr Crail