Antigone

The curse of Oedipus descends on the next generation in this foundational Greek tragedy. Antigone, daughter of the disgraced king, faces an impossible choice: obey the law of the state, or honor the divine mandate that demands every body receive burial. When her uncle Creon, now ruler of Thebes, decrees that her traitor brother Polyneices will rot unburied while her other brother is celebrated as a hero, Antigone must choose between familial loyalty and civil obedience. This is a play about the violence that happens when two kinds of right collide. Antigone acts from ancient duty and familial love. Creon acts from political necessity and the survival of the state. Neither will yield. What unfolds is catastrophe, not because either character is villainous, but because both are unyielding in their conviction. The play endures because it poses a question with no clean answer: when human law and divine law demand opposite things, who has the right to judge? Antigone remains essential for anyone drawn to stories about principled people destroyed by the collision between duty and power.