In all things, promotion. In all ways, the hustle. At all times, closing—but never closed. This is my creed. This is my path. Walk with me, if you will, hand in hand on the shimmering road to success.

Sorry, I kinda zoned out for a second. What was I saying? Oh, yes! New Art Workers podcast episode is up, featuring an only-slightly French conversation with my dear friend, actor and (now!) filmmaker Nanouli Shevardnadze. We’ve performed in so many projects together, which, weirdly, we actually didn’t talk about very much. We had other stuff on our minds, I guess.

Listen here, if you want to find out what.

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with the stellar Darius M. Buckley and the scintillating Zach Fike Hodges!

I audition with this monologue sometimes, and have for many years. It’s never booked me any work so maybe I ought to stop, but there’s something about it that keeps bringing me back and if I’m not booking anyway, I might as well keep myself entertained. It’s from Anne Carson’s Antigonick, at the point where Kreon has given the order for Antigone to die, and then the Chorus has some stuff to say. I love Carson’s visceral hand-written edition; not an effect I can reproduce, but here’re the words:

how is a greek chorus like a lawyer
they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
finding an analogy
locating a prior example
so as to be able to say
this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is
not unique you know it happened before
or something much like it
we’re not at a loss how to think about this
we’re not without guidance
there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case
and file it away under

antigone buried alive friday afternoon
compare case histories 7, 17, and 49

now i could dig up those case histories
tell you about danaos and lykourgos and the sons of phineas
people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind
it wouldn’t help you
it didn't help me
it’s friday afternoon
there goes antigone to be buried alive
is there
any way
we can say
this is normal
rational
forgivable
or even in the widest definition ​just

no not really

If I had to hazard a guess, which I don’t, but I will anyway, I can’t move on from this piece because it simply feels good to acknowledge and say out loud in quite straightforward language that the situation at hand is stupid and fucked up and that everybody involved in the stupid fucked up situation is wrong, even the bystanders, even the people just trying to make sense of it—that even trying to make sense of it is in some way immoral.

The monologue has a lot going for it. It’s structurally very compelling, setting up the problem as a kind of defeatist joke, which then curdles into or reveals itself to be a bleak cynicism, which then gives way to just simple singular honesty. It’s both funny and sad how none of this transformational clarity has bearing on the action of the play: this is really just a commentary track to an atrocity. But it’s significant, I think, because if we’re to understand that the actions of the primary agents are set and there’s nothing we can do about that, this monologue nevertheless represents a person facing the full meaning of a hard truth and breaking out of their ironic detachment to say so, to be heard, to be seen, and to seek hearing and seeing in a desensitized moral landscape. It’s enormously powerful, and utterly powerless, and ain’t that just fuckin’ life.

Except… are the actions of the primary agents set? Is there nothing to do about any of it? The Chorus is not powerless. They are, right now, on stage with Kreon, watching Antigone go by. They could, in fact, simply stop the action, grab her, and go—for one example out of many things that could be done. I played Kreon in this play (my first show in America in 2019) and every night Haimon would be like, hey dad, don’t kill my girlfriend, and I always wanted to say “okay”. He’s so obviously right! What was stopping me? The script. What’s stopping the Chorus here? The script.

It’s an odd thing to say about a character, in most cases, that they’re in some way culpable because they’re just following the script, but Antigone is already freighted with prophecy, and this adaption in particular is frankly obsessed with the uneasy status of character agency within narrative. These folks know they are participants in a world made up of words (much like ours) and react varyingly and accordingly. Playing along is a choice, and is done via advancing the script; or not. Kreon’s opening monologue is him listing his nouns and verbs for the day. In an argument with her sister Ismene, Antigone says “can a person be so / completely conscious of being unconscious / that she is guilty of her own repression” which is a big fucking problem of an idea, such that her action to rectify it, going off-script, as it were, or following a competing script, is her capital offence.

Eurydike, Kreon’s wife, does something similar. When she comes on, she introduces herself by saying “this is eurydike’s monologue it’s her / only speech in the play”. Not to make too fine a point of it because close reading is for nerds but note how the first line means: I am my words. She ends her speech by asserting that when the messenger comes, we’ll just tell him he’s wrong and everything’s fine, and then she says “exit eurydike bleeding from all orifices”. But, well, no. The stage direction disagrees. “[eurydike does not exit]” it says. And then the messenger enters and everything isn’t fine. Every script’s authority is contested by its characters, some more than others, but rarely so strongly and visibly as in this passage. Eurydike is trying to wield a kind of power over her world, the same kind of power that words have when men (Kreon) or gods (Anne Carson) use them. Unlike her niece, she’s not just doing her own script, she’s trying to force the issue for everyone else of which script to follow. It’s a bold gambit. It doesn’t go her way.

All of this to say that I think it’s unusual but fair, with an understanding of the play’s pretty explicit view that executing the action of the script is a process of contention and meaning-making for its characters, that we circle back to the Chorus talking about the bad moral math of the unfortunate event and asking, hey buddy, what’s going on here?

What’s going on here is they’re not the one being killed. They have the lucky position within the play of not having to take action—paired with the additional gift of getting to construct what all of it means. But something doesn’t add up. Their line in the monologue there, about knowing the historical parallels, how “it wouldn’t help you / it didn’t help me”: on reflection that reads to me like a self-soothing assertion, an excuse for inaction. It didn’t help with what, exactly? We’re supposed to take you at your word… why? It just feels kinda hinky, and self-exculpatory, and, dare I say, smug. Like, the bad news is we’re all damned beyond hope, but the good news is I’ve decided that means we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s giving centrist. It’s giving doomer. It’s giving The New York Times.

Actually, oh my god, the self-appointed institutional voice of the polis providing an allegedly objective accounting of a broken society from a safe remove while privileging the views and voices of power… is this a pitch? Are we pitching Antigonick: A Story About American Journalism? Quick, gitchie gitchie Scott Rudin on the phone.

The draw of the monologue remains, though, because despite (or thanks to) all the thorny complications of the position of the Chorus, the words are true, for them and for me in repetition: the situation at hand is stupid and fucked up and everybody involved is made wrong by it, even the bystanders, even the people just trying to make sense of it. Even trying to make sense of it is in some way immoral. But here we are. It’s 2026. There goes the world to be burned alive.

Love ya,

C

Links & Sundry

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on lessons to learn from chucking Bolsonaro.

On the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign conducted in your name. And in my name.

On the efforts to limit oligarchic consolidation of the media and information system.

In a very different direction, did you know you’re allowed to read film criticism by people who actually like movies?

And while I don’t have anything for you (yet!) about The Odyssey, you can read my reflection on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is, structurally, an odyssey.