Chicago Reader
- Not Recommended
"...Perhaps the Promethean Theatre Ensemble production is lacking some essential spark; perhaps the play has merely outlived its usefulness. Despite everyone’s best efforts, this Antigone defies relevance."
Stage and Cinema
- Recommended
"...Director Elaine Carlson is quite faithful to the Galantiere adaptation, at least from what I can remember of it. I understand the desire not to futz with a revered—rightly or not—text, but nothing should be held that sacred. The first scene of the play proper is a long conversation between Antigone and her childhood nurse (marssie Mencotti). It is sweet and beautifully acted—Mencotti is rather wonderful. It is also utterly pointless. It was so in the text and it will be so in future productions. On its own, it could have skated, but following the interminable Greek chorus it means that the first ten minutes or so of a ninety-minute play are stultifying."
Around The Town Chicago
- Recommended
"...We all know that Greek tragedies have been on stages for centuries and many theater audiences prefer to avoid these long, drawn out melodramas. Promethean Theatre Ensemble is a company that produces and develops through adaptations that bring these stories to a more modern look and tie the storyline to a service organization that they select to support and promote with each production. This adaptation by Lewis Galantiere of Jean Anouilh’s 1944 adaptation of That written by Sophocles, brings us a much shorter ( 95 minutes -no intermission) version, and makes the characters very real."
Third Coast Review
- Recommended
"...The contemporary version of the play Antigone, written by Jean Anouilh almost 2400 years after Sophocles’ original, preserves the Greek play’s theme: the conflict between individual conscience and governmental edict. Although King Creon decrees that Antigone’s brother Polynices should not be given a proper burial because Creon considers him a rebel and a traitor, Antigone persists in giving her brother the burial she believes is essential. The Anouilh play was first performed in Paris during the Nazi occupation."
Chicago On Stage
- Highly Recommended
"...This version of Antigone, less well-known and certainly less often produced than Sophocles’ classic telling of the tale, is the perfect one for these darker times when even truth itself is called into question and it’s hard to know the best way to respond to what’s going on. As Carlson points out, most of us would like to be Antigone, refusing to accept wrongful behavior, but it’s frightening to do so, and we end up instead doing the safer thing: “we shield ourselves with logic and busy ourselves with meaningless tasks” as our world crumbles around us. It’s not an unreasonable response. Ultimately, though, it can’t change anything at all."
Splash Magazine
- Highly Recommended
"...Carlson succeeds in presenting Antigone in the present day while preserving Anouilh’s themes of conscience and resistance. By placing Thebes within a totalitarian government and incorporating cell phones as props, the production invites audiences to draw parallels between the play and contemporary America. Examples such as Creon’s rhetoric about power and order, the use of phones as vehicles for news media, and the guards’ resemblance to ICE agents make it difficult not to see the story’s relevance to today’s world."
NewCity Chicago
- Somewhat Recommended
"...Director Elaine Carlson seems to have had difficulty dealing with the script’s hard-eyed realism, as embodied in Anouilh’s detached, omniscient narrator. As portrayed by Christina Renee Jones, the narrator exudes an exaggerated, almost clownish glee as she informs the audience of the ruin and grief facing all of the play’s major characters."
