Tragic Threads

As I found my seat in the third row of the Jerome Robbins Theater, I wondered if the show had already begun. I watched, entranced, as an ensemble of eccentrically clad performers downed Boxed Waters and chatted gleefully among themselves. Then, a woman sporting a bob and draped in beige, purple, and gray walked up to a trench coat dangling ominously from the rafters. She embraced it, her head pressed against the lapels as though she were listening for a heartbeat, before drifting over to a table downstage. Plucking gum from her mouth, she cleared her throat and prepared to address the audience. “How do we honor our dead?” she asked.

It was an appropriate, somber start to an unlikely staging of Antigone. Conceived by Sara Lopez of the fashion house A—Company and directed by Daphné Dumons (the woman with the bob), the sleek yet earnest production excerpted scenes from Anne Carson’s new translation of the source material. Whereas Dumons likened it to an open rehearsal, the event seemed to me a work in process, and maybe therefore a work about process.

Maybe I was simp…