Fall Book

This play hits a lot of things I really like--adaptation of Greek tragedy, a campus play, Jewish issues, metatheatrical and metaliterary themes. Set in a traditional college in Boston, the play is about Judy Miller, a Jewish senior who rewrites Antigone in the context of the nuclear arms race as a final project for a Greek tragedy course. The professor, Henry Harper, sees this as an affront to Sophocles and refuses to grade the play as a final, which would endanger Judy's ability to graduate and move into the fine financial industry job she's already secured. Harper has a consistently narrow vision of Greek tragedy--a conservative Classicist--and denigrates pretty much any suggestion that the Greeks can be meaningful for the modern world, rather than exclusively important in themselves as great works of art. The situation is complicated by Harper's tenuous position. There have been repeated suggestions that his sweeping comparisons of Greek and Jewish civilization/world views are anti-Semitic, and his courses are consistently under-enrolled. As Miller's play gains support from the community (though only tenuously from the college administration), more pressure is put on Harper to grade her generously if he wants to keep his job. Simultaneously, Miller becomes more and more strident, not only in her push for nuclear disarmament, but also in a broader critique of nationalism, capitalism, and the WASP-ish world her whole life has been oriented toward. But she also becomes more antagonistic of Harper. As he mentions/implies several times, their clash is inevitable. Finally, both characters effectively end up renouncing things they had desired: Miller abandons the career-trajectory she had been on, and Harper self-imposes an exile from teaching. Like Creon and Antigone in Sophocles, we can see in retrospect that each character's fate was inevitable.