Reed College - Griffin Yearbook (Portland, OR)

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. ANTIGONE S THE long spring weeks of 1914 brightend into summer it was fitting that, for the time, the whole college should turn Greek, in preparation for that solem festival in honor of the Great God that should crown each year. It was fitting, too, that even the Gothic chapel should transform itself into a Greek temple, and the library belo into a greenroom, while the com- munity gave itself to thepresentation of Sophocles, tragedy. The difficulty of creating a Greek stage in the chapel, or, having created it, of creating ways of getting actors upon it from behind the scenes seemd at moments beyond conquering. To present in Greek again, by inexperienst actors, before an American audience a play at once so fundamental and yet so remote from the motivs that stir us today seemd a task for supermen. That in our stage manager, and her corps of aids, we had some such more than mortals, the outcome shoed. The American audience, seeing Antigone in the dawn, disclosing her purpose to tearful Ismene, and seeing the lovely color pa- geant offerd by the Theban corus. descending the steps at the right of the stage, had no sense of difhculty 0r remoteness. Antigone, slim, girlish, with bowd hed, but unshaken wil; Creon, unhappy autocrat, moved too late to mercy; Tiresias, trembling in voice and limb, but bearing king and people before him by his majesty; the loquacius gard; the eloquent little 1915 COLLEGE ANNUAL 4- messenger; Eurydice, the queen, distraut by cumulated disas- ter; Haemon, son and lover, flinging himself from our sight to his doom; all these livd before us. They wer of every age and our age. Before the universal Vision of human weakness restling with a fate beyond its strength, ourselvs and time and place were alike forgotten, Much as the principals did to effect this result, the Theban women must not be forgotten. They servd as interpreters, who supplied the atmosfere invwhich, for many of the audience, the play moved and was transfigured. Their weeks of rehear- sal, under leaders who spared neither time nor skil, bore ample fruit. er caut our mood from their ecstatic faces and swirling forms as they sang and danst in the wonderful ode to Bacchus, or from the saddend gaze and lagging step with which they left us, to the words of their Coryphaeus, ttGreat words of prideful men ar ever punisht with great bloesf, The giving of Antigone will always be a memory of beauty. To those who workt hard, thru fatigue and discour- agements for many weeks, the memory of fatigue has blotted itself out in the comfort of a noble result achievd against ods. To those of us who merely lookt on the memory is one of es- thetic satisfaction, rought for us by wise and skilful hands, and made to seem our own, despite far seas and separating cen- tunes. Antigone .................................... Grace Hays Ismene, her sister ........................... LOIS Williams

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