Review: Aztec Empire rises in gripping spectacle with reimagining of Sophocles Antigone at Getty Villa
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Set us as preferred Evelina Fernández’s “Antigone: In the Language of Kings” receives a theatrically entrancing staging at the Getty Villa’s Outdoor Theater in a production co-produced with Latino Theater Company.The adaptation resets Sophocles’ tragedy to Aztec culture in a transposition that is both visually and musically enlivening.If the drama is oversimplified, it nonetheless makes for a gripping spectacle.It’s not easy to find analogies that can reanimate the importance of burial rites to a modern audience.
The production’s creative team, led by the inexhaustibly inventive director José Luis Valenzuela, returns us to a world where the dead are owed sacred duties and the living are fearful to renege on this basic human responsibility.The incense-filled production — conducted in English, Spanish and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs), with English and Spanish supertitles — proceeds like a pageant.
Headdress-clad warriors clash on the battlefield.A masked chorus, moving with the coordination of a Broadway musical ensemble, gives voice to the anxiety and grief of the collective.
A statuesque figure of death, trailing black fabric, sweeps up the casualties of war with the efficiency of a human vacuum.In Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus’ headstrong daughter, defies the edict issued by her uncle Creon, the newly deputized king, declaring that her slain brother Polynices is an enemy of the state and therefore ineligible for burial.For Antigone this is an imposition of political power over divine law, and she puts her life on the line to uphold her obligation to her family and faith.The German philosopher Hegel considered Sophocles’ “Antigone” the high-water mark of tragedy for the way it dramatizes the collision between two equally justified moral positions.
Creon, representing the claims of the poli...