Sometimes, an adaptation of a classic work, even one 2,500 years old, reveals more about our own times than the times of its original writer. Anne Carson’s “Antigonick,” written 2012, the Greek tragedy about a girl who wants to properly bury her brother, a declared “enemy” of Thebes, when the king forbade it, was a portent of the times to come, the times we are in right now.

A MacArthur Genius and Canadian national treasure, Anne Carson translated Sophocles’ “Antigone” twice, once in a full-length play and again in the much shorter modernized version titled “Antigonick.” As a part of their 2025 LitFest, City of Asylum brought her to Pittsburgh last weekend for a staged reading of the play.

Local writers, including me, were invited to take on the parts as Carson read the chorus. I was Kre

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