ANTIGONE IN FERGUSON

Antigone in Ferguson is a groundbreaking project that fuses dramatic readings by acclaimed actors of Sophocles’ Antigone with live choral music performed by a diverse choir, including police officers, activists, youth, teachers, and concerned citizens from Ferguson, Missouri and New York City, culminating in powerful, healing discussions about race and social justice. Antigone in Ferguson was conceived in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in 2014, through a collaboration between Theater of War Productions and community members from Ferguson, MO, and premiered at Normandy High School, Michael Brown’s alma mater, in September of 2016.

Sophocles’ Antigone is an ancient play about a teenage girl who wishes to bury her brother, Polyneices, who recently died in a brutal civil war. Creon, the new, untested king, has ruled that Polyneices’ body must remain above the earth, and that anyone who breaks this law will be put to death. Antigone openly and intentionally defies his edict, covering her brother’s body with dirt and publicly declaring her allegiance to a higher law, one that transcends that of the state—the law of love. Creon is then forced, by his own political rhetoric, and the by fragile social order that he has barely begun to establish since the civil war, to make an example of his niece, by sentencing her to death. In the process of following through with his own decree, Creon loses everything. At its core, Antigone is a play about what happens when personal conviction and state law clash, raising the question: When everyone is right (or feels justified), how do we avert the violence that will inevitably take place?

2019 St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn, NY
2018 Harlem Stage, NYC
2017 Summer Nostos Festival, SNFCC, Athens

THE DRUM MAJOR INSTINCT

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his sermon “The Drum Major Instinct” on Sunday, February 4, 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, exactly two months before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. In it, he prophetically spoke of his own imminent death and laid out a challenge to his congregation, and also the world, to harness an inborn human drive—“the desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first”— and use it to promote justice, righteousness, and peace by channeling it into acts of service and love. More than fifty years after King’s death, his words resonate with new depth and meaning, empowering us to celebrate the hard won victories of the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously interrogating the structures, hierarchies, and systems, still in place, which have inhibited progress and sustained the oppression of countless people and communities. It is in the spirit of promoting open, candid, constructive dialogue between diverse audiences that Theater of War performs its adaptation King’s sermon, with the hope that it will lead to compassion, connection, and positive action.

2018 Summer Nostos Festival, SNFCC, Athens