LSU Theatre sets 'Antigone' in punk rock era

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Oct 18, 2009

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They were angry, they were bored.

And the combination was potentially explosive.

“They’d get so bored that they’d just bang their heads against a wall,” Kaitlyn Stockwell said. “Can you imagine that? Being that bored?”

But they were. And anarchy was the result, as it will be when the LSU Department of Theatre stages its punk rock Mainstage production of Antigone in the Claude L. Shaver Theatre. The play opens Monday, Oct. 19, and offers audiences a new take on Sophocles’ Greek tragedy.

Sure, the chorus will be there. Where would a Greek tragedy be without it? And the dialogue hasn’t changed.

But the setting, well, it might be a little confusing at first. Definitely chaotic. Because chaos is a main ingredient of anarchy, and the 1980s punk culture thrived on it.

“They were tribal,” Nick Erickson said.

“They defined themselves by the clothes they wore and their accoutrements.”

He lifts a silver chain attached to the shoulder of his leather jacket and studies it. His eyes are bordered by eyeliner, his head topped by a blue Mohawk.

You usually wouldn’t see him dressed this way. And you certainly wouldn’t see Stockwell’s hair spiked in a red Mohawk. But this is the nature of Creon and Antigone in the 1980s, an interesting historic era in Stockwell’s eyes.

She’s a senior theatre performance major at LSU. She plays Antigone.

As for Erickson, the punk era isn’t so foreign.

“I was around for this,” he said. “I was in college in 1981 when all of this was going on. I remember my friends and I listening to the Sex Pistols late at night.”