Antigone 2025

What is unbearable to you about this mad king’s decisions and what will you do about it?

“My favorite stories are the ones that leave me feeling more human rather than less,” I said to a student last Thursday, and it has stayed near me ever since, like a ghost following me in the dark. Even when the sun is shining. I say it often enough but this felt different.

Toulouse Lautrec’s Bartet and Moulet-Sully in Antigone, courtesy of the Met Open Access Collection.

I thought of it again after I saw a production Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles Antigone, in Barnard, VT at BarnArts, near me. The show is directed by Erin Bennett, who I first met when she worked with us at the Dartmouth English and Creative Writing Department. We went with friends also from the department. A 4PM show created as a snow date for snow coming the next day—so we had tickets for Sunday night, and saw it on Saturday afternoon.

It had been a long week of learning every day that something you loved or needed or hadn’t thought anyone would think was optional was in danger of being destroyed by the Trump administration. Cancer research, cancer detection, cancer care. The National Parks. Trans people and their healthcare. Funding for AIDS patients around the world. The CFPB, the CDC, the rapid pandemic response teams. The technicians for nuclear warheads. The Department of Education, education for the disabled. Medicaid. All of it being contested in court but done with a manic, rapacious air, with no common sense much less legal authority. Trump and Musk together like a pair of wannabe mad kings on a rampage, something from a Mark Millar comic. In what now feels like a strange counterpoint to this story, a young Republican woman social media influencer revealed she had Musk’s 13th child and tried to negotiate some kind of settlement with him on X. He had not been answering her messages.

I spent the day reading some very powerful and sensible letters like this Sarah Thankam Mathews letter and this letter from Neil A. Abrams on how other countries have successfully fought off authoritarians and would-be authoritarians, and how these efforts might guide you. But by the afternoon, I needed my world to get small again for a moment, to find my way in the dark in the snow by the light off of our car’s headlights, a little tunnel of brightness through the afternoon dark. Leading us to something like a little church but for theater—a theater—the cast, dressed in flowers, embroidered clothes and ribbons, a little like Godspell, their faces bright with make-up as if they were clowns, though the actor playing Haimon, for example, his make-up, when the lights went down, made him look a little like a skull. A premonition of his death. So dark enough certainly for that.

The play, if you don’t know it: Antigone’s brothers have died fighting each other in a civil war, each on opposite sides. The king of Thebes, Kreon, has forbidden the burial of one of the brother’s, Polynices, a terrible punishment, leaving him to be food for the dogs and the carrion birds. Antigone refuses to obey the law and goes, not so secretly, about the task of honoring him at least in the traditional ways. When caught at it, she is brought before the king, the father of her fiancé, Haimon, and is defiant as he sentences her to death. Haimon vows to die with her and does, his mother, Kreon’s wife Eurydice, also kills herself on learning of their deaths, and thus is Kreon damned.

I don’t know that the production was planned to be timely or if that can ever be done but it was good to see a story yesterday about people struggling to be rid of a ruler intent on protecting only his own selfish ego, which brings about his downfall. Anne Carson’s translations made the old play flash in the dark as did the excellent production. I was especially moved by the way Teiresias, played by Kyle Huck, seemed to summon something much older than her or the play as they spoke to the king about what was in store for him if he did not change his ways. And then spoke to him again, as that fate bore down on him. All of the actors moved me—the ensemble seemed tight knit, and the play responded well to that care. Bridget Hammond as Antigone was forceful, charismatic and direct, and her death scene with Aaron Michael Hodge as Haimon was especially moving. The actors and the play managed that magic trick you go to theater for, where they were our whole world until the story ended.

I left grateful for these artists living near me in Vermont, whirling around the wooden stage between our bleachers. But as we drove back, I wondered what it would be that would make our contemporary kings weep with grief and regret? I couldn’t think of anything. Kreon at least loved his son, even if he wouldn’t listen to him. I wonder if we will ever know?

What is unbearable to you about this mad king’s decisions and what will you do about it? Antigone’s question for her sister, but also the audience, and by that I mean anyone who has ever seen the play. A question to think about as the weekend draws down.

This photo is by Griffin Hansbury, author of Some Strange Music Draws Me In, winner of the Stonewall Award for Literature 2025. In paperback soon but I loved it, I wouldn’t wait. A trans coming of age novel that is also somehow the most Massachusetts of recent novels.

• The Department of Education FAFSA changes are open for comment, including the requirement that trans kids have to misgender themselves. Tell them what you think.

• Please read about Frances Thompson, a Black trans woman who testified to Congress in 1866 about her sexual assault during the Memphis Massacre, believed to be the first Black trans woman to speak to Congress.

• Joy and Jo Banner are twin Black sisters who have purchased the plantation that was the site of the largest American slave revolt in Louisiana, a part of the work they do as founders of The Descendants Project. Very inspiring sisters! Check them out.

• This group of Minnesota doctors got together to write a letter about how they are not going to stop young trans people, but will in fact expand what they do.

• And if you are looking for ways to get involved in community work that is not protesting or voting, here is a list from organizer and author Mariame Kaba’s

  Prisonculture
  newsletter. Be sure to check out We Do This Til We Free Us, her inspiring book on abolitionist work.

• Noura Erakat on the Imperial Boomerang.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee