Ancient Politics for Our Time

The small, polished lobby of the old Subway Terminal Building in downtown Los Angeles suggests neoclassical splendor: columns, marble, a copy of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” potted palms.

Directly adjacent to the lobby is a massive room--actually, a ruin--with additional classical columns. But these have been stripped of their adornments, about one-third of the way down each column, so that the bare interior of the column is left exposed. These denuded columns support a once-grand ceiling that’s now pockmarked.

Into this environment of decayed grandeur, Cornerstone Theater is bringing the ancient tale of Antigone. Best known from the Sophocles play, Antigone was the young woman who smelled something rotten in the state of Thebes--literally, the remains of her vanquished rebel brother--and vowed to give him a proper burial, thereby defying her uncle, King Creon.

Cornerstone’s version of the tale is no longer Greek. “An Antigone Story,” subtitled “A Hijack,” is set in Los Angeles 10 years from now. Antigone’s brother’s body has been dumped in the middle of Pershing Square, which is only a half-block south of the Subway Terminal Building. Because of the recent debate over whether Pershing Square should be used for protests during the Democratic convention next month and because the production of “An Antigone Story” will continue during the convention, the location has acquired even more symbolic freight. Antigone is a legendary figure whose personal stance against a state policy has served as a model for centuries of political protesters.

In Shishir Kurup’s adaptation, the United States has disintegrated into rival “conglomerates.” We’re in CAN--the former California, Arizona and Nevada--which is ruled by a chancellor named Krayon, who was a media mogul before he rose to political power. His late nephew was not only working for a rival conglomerate, but was also a disreputable drug dealer, or so Krayon claims. No matter, says the dead man’s sister, Antigone. Her brother’s body should be interred, not just dumped.

While disposal of corpses may not be the most debated issue in contemporary America, Kurup believes that individuals comparable to Antigone still exist. He cites Julia “Butterfly” Hill, the young woman who lived in a Northern California tree for two years, successfully sparing the redwood from a timber company’s designs. Other issues arise that might easily evoke similar responses, Kurup said, pointing to such topics as homosexual unions, draconian drug laws, “three strikes” laws and “the dark side of globalization” that spurred recent protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C.

If the world is being so globalized, what accounts for the breakup of the United States in Kurup’s scenario? Kurup said he wanted a political configuration similar to the warring city-states of ancient Greece. Besides, he said, a few social prognosticators have speculated that the U.S. could indeed dissolve into smaller units “that have constant, little economic wars with each other.”

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Born in Bombay and raised in India, Kenya and the U.S., Kurup, 38, may have more of a global perspective than most of L.A.’s theater artists. After obtaining a graduate degree in theater at UC San Diego, he came to L.A. in part because of its ethnic diversity. He became active at Los Angeles Theatre Center, then migrated to the solo performance arena after the LATC company collapsed in 1991. But he returned to ensemble work in 1993 with Cornerstone, one of L.A.’s most multicultural arts institutions, and he became a company member in 1994.

“An Antigone Story” is not one of Cornerstone’s signature pieces in which it works within a particular community, mingling its professionals with local amateurs. Instead, the cast was taken from the in-house ensemble and other professionals who periodically work with the company. However, three of the production’s actors were recruited into Cornerstone from the community-based ranks with which the company worked.

Kurup was attracted to the Antigone story not simply because he wants to champion Antigone’s position, but also because “I want to explore her kind of character in a complex, Clintonian world. Leaders have to deal with shades of gray. Although it can make them feel wishy-washy, sometimes it’s a sign of maturity. I wanted to juxtapose Antigone’s single-mindedness against a leader who has to balance constituencies.”

He also hopes to examine the role of the media in this process. The audience will sit far from some of the action in this production, and parts of the story will take place in alcoves that aren’t even visible, but video cameras will project close-ups of the remote events on a wall. In contrast to some of the previous versions of the story (Kurup studied Brecht’s and Anouilh’s in addition to Sophocles’), “we want the storytelling to be visual more than verbal,” he said.

Kurup was considering this kind of visualization from the beginning. “I wanted a rock milieu, and today’s rock concerts really employ live video to create intimacy within a huge crowd,” he said. However, he didn’t quite know how to accomplish this, until a workshop version of “An Antigone Story” played the Getty Center last spring, in conjunction with a larger Getty show about modern art inspired by classical sources.

The Getty allowed him to use what he calls “amazingly bright projectors” and a 40-foot screen. The Getty auditorium is wide and shallow--in contrast to the long, narrow space that Kurup had already decided to use in the Subway Terminal Building--so he had to rethink his staging, and the access to the Getty’s projection facilities enabled him to figure out how he could “say one thing and show something else,” he said.

The camera’s ability to “project what’s happening, immediately, became very important to me. The camera can be incredibly invasive, yet we’ve been able to see some incredible things with it. It’s given us the Rodney King tape as well as the ‘Jerry Springer Show.’ ” For the Subway Terminal production, Kurup is using a wall as a screen. Cornerstone bought a projector that Kurup estimated is worth about a twentieth as much as the Getty’s, but he believes it will suffice.

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In “An Antigone Story,” the Greek chorus has been condensed into one actor, Korus, who is a documentary filmmaker. However, he’s also omniscient; he knows what will happen to Antigone. So he’s presented with the dilemma of whether to warn her. Kurup said he’s fascinated by the ethical question facing journalists: “What are the repercussions of interfering or not?”

The Getty staging had its own backstage drama. At a final rehearsal, just before the first public performance at the Getty, Kurup’s personal and professional partner for the last 10 years, Page Leong--for whom he wrote the title role--slipped on a CD on the stage and severed a tendon in the region of her knee. The first performance was canceled while she was taken to the emergency room. But the following day, the show went on, with Leong in a cast and a wheelchair, while Kurup pushed her around the stage.

Leong is still recovering, so she will use a wheelchair--this time self-propelled--during about 80% of the show, she said. However, during the musical interludes that dot the script, she will stand and sing without the chair, and with guitar in hand (although most of the rock score, by Kurup and Paul James, has been prerecorded).

Unlike the original character, this Antigone is not a teenager. “She’s a woman in her late 20s or early 30s, who has been a performance artist and a rock ‘n’ roll singer,” Kurup said. “She’s the black sheep of a political family.”

While the Getty Center, in all of its glory, is Krayon’s natural habitat, Kurup said, the Subway Terminal Building “feels more like Antigone’s space.” It was built in 1925 for the Red Cars, which departed from under the enormous room where “An Antigone Story” will be staged. Later the building served as a hospital. Collage Dance Theatre pioneered it as a performance space last spring, to critical acclaim.

“When I saw those columns, I immediately thought ‘Greek’ on a banal level,” Kurup said. But the state of disrepair of the larger room gives it “a real ‘mists of time’ thing,” he added. “From the opulence of the lobby to the faded glory of the inner space, it’s a potent metaphor for making sense out of an old story.”

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“AN ANTIGONE STORY (A HIJACK),” Subway Terminal Building, 417 S. Hill St., Los Angeles. Dates: Opens Saturday. Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Aug. 20. Price: $15. Phone: (213) 613-1700, Ext. 31.