Anti-Gone – 16 August 2025

Needs More Work Productions presented an hour long interactive production of Anti-Gone as part of the Little Shakespeare Festival at Under St. Marks. This talented all-female cast made Sophocles’s classic Antigone a simple-to-understand story that captured the intensity of the original as well as the stylistic conventions of a Greek chorus. When paring a lengthy piece like this down to a tight hour, there’s not a moment to waste, and although I personally felt like some of the audience interaction moments were gratuitous (ex. having an audience member read lines), it was clear that the audience enjoyed and treasured these moments as a necessary way to keep people engaged.

The music between the scenes was really beautiful, as was the accompanying choreography. However, I found the vocal harmonies so entrancing that I lost sight of the words and how each piece was supposed to fit into the Gestalt of the show. Similarly the lighting design was beautiful, but at times it didn’t feel like there were clear intentions or dramaturgically sound reasons for the points at which the lighting shifted. For example, lighting could have been meaningfully used to indicate when we were in the world of the production and when we were in the world of the theater space itself. The audience could have been invited in more clearly and it would have been more emotionally powerful to build this gradually in the scene where Antigone asked the audience who would join her. It also could’ve helped with clarity on when someone was in character versus breaking character.

The pre-show was already in progress when I arrived, so I don’t know how long the actors had been improvising on the theme of watching Polynices’s body. The pre-show was high energy and set the right tone for the partial improvisation and types of audience engagement that surfaced later in the performance.

On the whole, Anti-Gone was a fun way to spend a tight hour. The audience seemed to be primarily composed of friends of the cast and casts of other shows in this particular festival. As such, it was a supportive house with accurate expectations for what they were going to see. If I removed these expectations and evaluated the show in a broader context, I’m really not sure who the target audience is in terms of age and familiarity with the source material. It walked the line between didactic and artistic in ways that could be best suited as an instructional tool or an example of theatre more than a true performance of theatre. The production as a whole seemed to say, “this is what theatre can be” more than it said “this is what theatre is.” It felt like the start of a conversation, not a complete conversation in and of itself.

Make no mistake, the start of a conversation is a very meaningful part, as it does the work of setting the tone for the rest of the conversation. It’s the part of a conversation where everyone more or less establishes how they feel and who they will embody as the conversation goes on. Anti-Gone started a very hopeful conversation about how theatre has the power to be feminist, powerful, and ephemeral. As we’re reminded verbally in the performance, our time together in the space is limited. Yet the impressions that linger are not— and they can hold our thoughts for some time after. What is justice? Who has the right to govern? What is defiance? Most importantly— what stories do we pass down and who do we celebrate within them? The story is not named for Creon, the unjust oppressor. We are meant to walk away thinking about Antigone, the bold young woman who resisted. Needs More Work Productions did a fantastic job of starting these conversations. May they linger on in today’s unjust world.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Needs More Work Productions.