Theater: The Mills of the Gods

The sheer tensile strength of a woman’s will in Greek tragedy is unparalleled in any other literature. Of 33 extant plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, ten bear the names of women. Among the 39 Shakespearean titles, only three acknowledge women—Juliet, Cleopatra and Cressida—and all three share top billing with men. Sophocles’ Antigone is a test of wills between a man and a woman, a king and his subject.

Antigone wants only to perform the ritual of burying her dead brother Polynices. But he has died fighting against Thebes, and the city-state’s tyrant, Creon, orders that the body lie unburied. Blind as his predecessor Oedipus, Creon unknowingly flouts the gods in his overweening pride. Moreover, Antigone is Oedipus’ daughter. In Greek tragedy, the mills of the gods grind from generation to generation. Antigone buries her brother at the cost of her life, and Creon forfeits the lives of his son and his wife to the gods’ anger.

The revival at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is of Olympian stature, the finest work that has ever been done there. In voice and bearing, Philip Bosco’s Creon is an image of power and arrogance until he receives his terrible rebuke. Martha Henry’s Antigone is a female javelin seeking death and wielding it. The myth may say that Prometheus stole fire and gave it to men. Actually, he gave it to women like Antigone and her formidable sisters, Medea and Electra and Helen.