Fine support is given by Phyllis Kay as Creon’s wife, Eurydice, and by Stephen Berenson as Alcebaides, the king’s chief minister, who early on is adamant that Creon not weaken his grip on authority by pardoning Antigone. As soon as the populace take to the streets in angry support of Antigone, the advisor abruptly reverses his Cheney-esque fixation; simultaneously, Creon furiously reverses his gentle patience with his niece, when she tests him one too many times. I was never more impressed with the writing of this play than when that double change of heart immediately seemed inevitable — that can’t happen without skillful prior character development.
Most collaborative director/playwrights, with the prominent exception of Moises Kaufman, who wrote The Laramie Project with the Tectonic Theater Project, take sole credit regardless of rehearsal hall contributions. Thanks in the program’s Director’s Notes is usually all that actors get for crucial lines they provide or change and characters they develop after the initial rough playscript is done. Columbus’s invitation to company members to change and add lines in developing their characters, as well as to clarify the concerns of the chorus, was a rare act of humility. So too was his passing on the reins of the project to director McEleney, whose imaginative direction compels our attention. Clearly, the work itself was the most important focus for Columbus in the rehearsal hall, a place where directors are not usually known to keep their egos in check.
The thrust of this play in just about every scene is to make us think. We are asked to examine the frailty of motivation, the tentativeness of hotly arrived-at positions, and the shaky reliability of coldly considered decisions by even the best and brightest among us. The chorus challenges us to ask questions: What is a hero? What is our duty? The Trinity ensemble attempts to provide answers, and instructs us, only in the sense that Socrates accomplished that by his incessant questioning two dozen centuries ago.
Related:
Making magic, Dying breeds, Best of show, More 
- Making magic
Ever since the Greeks learned to keep their masks on straight and not bump into the statuary, theaters and theatergoers have been learning more and more about how the magic works.
- Dying breeds
Chekhov insisted that his final masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard , was a comedy and fumed at Stanislavsky’s having his characters suffer through their fraying existences at the pace of a Robert Wilson opus.
- Best of show
After all, every nominee for a best actor or actress Tony or Oscar usually deserves to win.
- September songs
“Try to remember the kind of September/When life was slow and oh, so mellow,” sings El Gallo at the top of The Fantasticks .
- A universal tale
Success has earned The Fantasticks a bad rap.
- Encore!
Oh, what a jaded bunch of seat-warmers we can become, those of us who see a lot of theater — good theater, that is. But now and then we encounter a production or a performance that reminds us of what we knew all along.
- Review: Secret Rapture
Art is artifice, as we all accept. But sometimes it's hard for artists to take a deep breath and skillfully apply more of the latter to amplify the former.
- Berlin calling
If you ask someone whether they've seen Cabaret , odds are the answer will be yes. Ask Curt Columbus, and the answer is likely to be: Which one? Sitting in the upstairs theater of Trinity Repertory Company, where their production runs through October 11, the artistic director rattled off a chronology as lengthy as a convoluted German sentence.
- Fall on the boards
There are tours to the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, Italy, Iraq, the Aran Islands, and even the Underworld on area stages this fall.
- Regrets/Rockettes
Scrooge is inclined to blame a mean night before Christmas on a badly digested bit of beef or a blob of mustard.
- Ain't that America
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is an odd god in the pantheon of great American theater.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Curt Columbus, More
, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Curt Columbus, Rachael Warren, Stephen Thorne, Joe Wilson, Mauro Hantman, Theater, Theatrical Plays, Angela Brazil, Less
