A group of audience members are seated in a circle, some on camping chairs and cushions, waiting for the show to begin. Seated among them are some of the performers of Beth Piatote’s “Antíkoni.” With an entirely Native American cast, “Antíkoni” offers a re-imagining of Sophocles’ classic play “Antigone,” told through a Nez Perce perspective. The play is performed at the Southwest Campus of the Autry, formerly known as the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. This campus once housed native remains, and the play directly engages with this fraught history. Questions of spirituality, institutional power and colonialism play out in the round, the immersive format giving the audience a sense of collective accountability.
Set in a near-future America, “Antíkoni” follows its titular heroine as she and her relatives disagree on how to handle the repatriation of their ancestor’s remains. The play recontextualizes the moral lines of the original story, questioning the balance between museums and native culture when it comes to caring for the dead. Playwright Beth Piatote and Director Madeline Sayet have created a lively, gripping tale, intertwining traditional Nez Perce storytelling with the original text.
“Antíkoni” premiered on Thursday, November 7, at the historic Southwest Museum Campus on Los Angeles’s Mount Washington. The play was produced by the Autry Museum of the American West’s Native Voices theater program, which is dedicated exclusively to showcasing and developing new plays by Native American, Alaska Native and First Nations playwrights. The organization is the only Actors’ Equity theater company dedicated to this work in the U.S. This year marks Native Voices’ 30th anniversary.
Playwright Beth Piatote is a member of the Nez Perce Tribe and the Colville Confederated Tribes. She serves as an associate professor of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, and directs the arts research center there. She first wrote “Antíkoni” as a written text in her 2019 short story collection “The Beadworkers.”
“I wrote it very much in the form of a Greek play,” Piatote explained, “but I never thought about it being on stage.”
Still, Piatote shared the piece with Mark Griffith, a classics professor and Sophocles scholar at UC Berkeley.
“He really loved the adaptation,” Piatote said, “and that actually started the ball rolling toward it becoming a stage production.”
First, there was staged reading with students from UC Berkeley’s Native literature and classics courses. Then, in 2020, Piatote workshopped the play with Native Voices over Zoom. Over the next few years, she further revised the text through additional staged readings with live audiences, including at Gonzaga University and New York Classical Theater. All of these iterations led to the current version that premiered this month in Los Angeles.
“It has the same core and some of the same text, but it has transformed a lot to become an embodied play for the stage.” Piatote said.
“Antíkoni” is an act of celebration and reclamation in various ways.
First, the reclaiming of a space. The Autry Museum’s Southwest campus closed officially in 2022, but it once housed large collections of Native artifacts, as well as Native remains. Some of these remains were not identified correctly, and therefore could not be returned home. They remain in the Autry’s resource center.
The production team also reclaimed the building itself: built in 1914, the historic space required some adaptations. The production team worked around regulations that prohibited altering the floors or walls, turning the lack of a traditional stage into an advantage.
The rewritten text also serves as a reclamation. While classical Greek stories are often seen as the epitome of literature and theater, this view disregards the fact that Native storytelling traditions are older than Greek literature.
In Sophocles’ “Antigone,” two brothers die in battle, fighting for opposite sides. Their uncle declares that Polynices, who dies attempting to overthrow his brother, should be left unburied as a warning to others. But his sister, Antigone, insists that he receive a proper burial: It’s the laws of the gods, she says, and those laws preside over the laws of the city. Antigone is the hero standing against her uncle Creon’s authority.
In “Antíkoni,” Kreon still has patriarchal and institutional authority, but the power structure of white supremacy is the overarching authority. Kreon believes he can change this system from within, and Antíkoni rejects the system entirely. Either way, their ethical choices are constrained by the colonial structure that they live under.
“None of them can make a decision that won’t take down others with them,” Piatote said. “The moral lines are distorted, not by the characters themselves, but by the structure of colonialism, which doesn’t allow people to live freely in relation to the past.”
Despite the heavy subject matter, “Antikoni” is not just a tragedy. Humor is a key element in the show, delivered with warmth and irreverence by a “chorus” of aunties, who replace the traditional Greek chorus. Traditional Native stories, like “Coyote Defeats the Sun” and “The Adventures of Pissing Boy” tell of the origin stories of the universe and celestial bodies. Piatote explained that the importance of humor in Native culture is often not understood by non-natives.
“Sometimes it can feel a little vulnerable to share a story with people outside the culture,” she said, emphasizing that audiences should laugh. “These stories are very colorful, and they are about being real about life and death and messiness, and being able to laugh at that.”
Piatote began learning her Indigenous language, Nez Perce, as an adult. That’s how she learned these stories: She listened to recordings of them, and then worked on translations. The changed spellings of the names of the original play’s title and character names come from the Nez Perce language. For example, since there is no “e” in Nez Perce, the Greek “-e” at the end of “Antigone” is rendered as “i.” The name Teiresias was changed to Tairasias, to follow the Nez Perce grammatical rule of vowel harmony. However, Piatote chose not to apply these rules of vowel harmony to Kreon, the play’s most complex character.
“I deliberately chose not to apply vowel harmony,” she said, “symbolizing his dissonance with both linguistic and tribal laws.”
The original Sophocles text ends in a bloodbath, but “Antíkoni” ends with more ambiguity.
“Part of that reason has to do with not wanting to kill off Native characters,” Piatote said.
This conclusion also asks the audience to sit with the uncomfortable truths about the ways in which colonialism dictates how Native people live in this country. The play also leaves the audience with questions: what do the living owe the dead? What are eternal laws compared to state laws? How does white supremacy impact us all?
This weekend marks the closing performances of “Antíkoni” at the historic Southwest Museum Campus in Los Angeles. Between there are just three shows remaining—an evening performance tonight, Friday November 23rd at 8:00 p.m. and two matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $30 for adults, and $20 for students, seniors, Autry Museum members and military.