Playwright Kenneth Cavander dusts the cobwebs off Sophocles’ Antigone in his contemporary adaptation of the 2500-year-old Greek tragedy … and the result is yet another Antaeus Theatre Company winner.

Gone, for instance, is the original play’s Greek Chorus, its place taken by a pair of Sentries (John Apicella and Kaci Hamilton) whose show-opening convo fills us in on the play’s backstory, that of a city nearly torn apart when Polynices, one of the two princes charged with ruling over it, decides he’d rather not share the power with his brother Eteocles, raises an army from another city, and precedes to attack his own people.

With neither brother the clear winner, their uncle Kreon (Tony Amendola) determines to solve the problem by having his nephews engage in one-on-one combat with the winner taking all, a plan that backfires when both brothers die of their wounds.

It’s at this point that Kreon issues a royal proclamation that Eteocles is to receive full military honors while the body of the traitorous Polynices will be transported far out of the city for wild dogs and carrion-eating birds tp pick it apart, and if anyone should try to bury the ill-fated prince, the penalty will be death by stoning.

A good idea in theory perhaps, but not one Polynices’ sister Antigone (Linda Park) can accept, particularly given that her uncle came to power only because the true heirs to the throne died at each other’s hands, and it is her uncle who is at fault.

And so Antigone asks her sister Ismene (Mildred Marie Langford) for help in giving Polynices the burial he so royally deserves.

Consequences ensue.

Completing the cast of characters is Kreon’s wife Euridike (Ann Noble), bound and determined that no one should dare oppose her husband’s absolute rule, and Kreon and Eurydikes’ son Haemon (Peter Mendoza), torn between his parents and a fiancée who just happens to be (you guessed it) none other than Antigone herself.

All of this adds up to nighttime soap-style fireworks to do Dynasty proud, and give Blake, Krystle, Alexis, Fallon, Steven, and Adam Carrington some tough competition where treachery, betrayal, and revenge are concerned.

It’s an approach that makes Cavander’s take on Antigone a good deal more accessible to modern audiences than a word-for-word translation would be, back-and-forth conversations taking the place of lengthy soliloquies, for example.

Not only that, but it’s hard not to make connections between Kreon’s blithe disregard for what the citizenry wants and needs (and his conviction that “might makes right”) with what our country has been going through these past sixteen months.

Andy Wolk directs Cavander’s Antigone with electrifying urgency, and the performances he has elicited command an audience’s attention from the play’s powerhouse prelude to its dramatic denouement.

Park makes a memorable and welcome return to the Antaeus stage with her fierce and fiery performances as a woman bound and determined to right an unforgivable wrong.

 Mendoza’s transition from dutiful son to passionate rebel represents some of his strongest and most magnetic work to date while Langford makes for the most supportive of sisters.

Apicella and Hamilton do solid work in their mostly expository roles, with Hamilton scoring bonus points for her mysterious and spooky West Indian-accented Teiresias.

Last but not least, Amendola and Noble steal every scene they are in as a man unwilling to accept anything but absolute power and a woman whose grief at the most insurmountable of losses is quite simply devastating.

Antigone couldn’t look any more striking than it does thanks to the design contributions of Sibyl  Wickersheimer (set), Jared A. Sayeg (lighting), Angela Balogh Calin (costumes), and John McElveney (props).

Sound designer Carter Dean, composer Lawrence Shragge, and fight director Jen Albert, meanwhile, up the dramatic tension and thrills every step of the way.

Caledonia Wilson is assistant director. Albert is intimacy director. Carter Vickers is assistant set designer. Jasmine Leung is production stage manager and Melissa Graff, and Claire Fogle are assistant stage managers.

Greek tragedy doesn’t need to be your thing (it’s certainly not mine) for you to find yourself enthralled and moved by Kenneth Cavander’s compelling new take on a millennia-old classic, making Antigone just the latest in a string of Antaeus Theatre Company triumphs.

Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, 110 East Broadway, Glendale. Through June 15. See website for detailed performance schedule.
www.Antaeus.org

–Steven Stanley
May 16, 2026
Photos: Craig Schwartz

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Tags: Kenneth Cavander, Los Angeles Theater Review, Sophocles, The Antaeus Company