COLOUR ME BEAUTIFUL: KARIM RASHID INJECTS PLAY INTO THE EVERYDAY

Arts Week

Poetic politics

“When the tragedy of Maher Arar came up in Canada,” says playwright/director Adam Seelig, “I realized we had to do this play as soon as possible.” But when Antigone: Insurgency opens Nov. 9 at Walmer Centre Theatre, don't expect some movie-of-the-week re-enactment of Arar's capture by American agents and his confinement and torture in Syria. Instead, Seelig's One Little Goat Theatre has reimagined Sophocles' 2,500-year-old drama, Antigone, about the balance between collective safety and individual rights.

“It's not my intent to grind any axes or be didactic,” says Seelig. “It's to show that the strict measures of national security, while necessary to a certain extent, can have potentially tragic consequences, and that this is not a new problem. It's one that democracies have faced since democracy was invented.”

The original Antigone told of the heroine's attempt to give her brother a proper burial, despite his being branded a traitor to the kingdom of Thebes. Here she is the young idealist, opposed by the older Creon, whose speech is drawn from modern news sound bites, like General Rick Hillier's dismissal of Afghan insurgents (“detestable murderers and scumbags”) and Pierre Elliot Trudeau's comments when he enforced the War Measures Act.

“The name Antigone literally means she who opposes her elders,” says Seelig. “One of the questions the play poses is whether fervent idealism is always a function of youth, and conservatism a function of age. Are the young self-destructive and the old self-preserving?”

As with the critically praised Ritter, Dene, Voss, One Little Goat's last production, Antigone: Insurgency takes a poetic approach.

“There will not be any verse,” says Seelig. “There will not be any rhyming. It is highly interpretive drama, by which I mean the scripts are used more as a score and an area of great exploration, rather than as a prescription of what actors and directors should do.”

Seelig notes that Antigone is usually portrayed by older actors, even though the character herself is in her late teens. In Seelig's play, she is portrayed by younger performer Cara Ricketts (pictured above). “She does not play Antigone from her first entrance, high on some pedestal and bathed in heroic light,” says Seelig. Instead the actress appears as herself, gradually finding her way into the role.

“The actors are one of us, and we're among them, relating to and identifying with each other in an intimate space,” says Seelig. “So poetic theatre is radically different from most theatre in the sense that it wants to bring you closer to the light of the work and closer to the artists, rather than keep you at a distance, in the dark.”

GORD McLAUGHLIN

ANTIGONE: INSURGENCY RUNS TO NOV 25. TUE-SAT 8PM; SUN 2PM. $20; $10 STUDENTS/SENIORS/ARTISTS; ADD $2 FINAL WEEK. WALMER CENTRE THEATRE, 188 LOWTHER. 416-915-0201. WWW.ONELITTLEGOAT.ORG.

EMAIL LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM