SUMMARY OF THE PROCESS:
: a 2017 SLU Theatre production created in collaboration with Prison Performing Arts; a 2018 production performed by PPA participants at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center; and a 2019 ERA/SATE professional production at The Chapel in St. Louis. The project began with weekly writing and development workshops at WERDCC, where participants studied, explored, and wrote through the Antigone story. That material was incorporated into the SLU production, returned to the prison in performance, and eventually became a professional devised work with seven Antigones. In the final version, the seven Antigones are incarcerated and sentenced to reenact their own story every day until they can figure out how to make it end without tragedy.
Miranda Jagels Félix (Antigone); Victoria Thomas (Ismene/Antigone); Natasha Toro (Eurydice/Antigone); Alicen Moser (Creon/Antigone); Taleesha Caturah (Tiresias/Antigone); Marcy Ann Wiegert (Drummer); Ellie Schwetye (Guard/Death/Antigone); Laura Hulsey (Haemon/Antigone). Director: Lucy Cashion; Costume Designer: Liz Henning; Scenic Designer & Sound Designer: Lucy Cashion; Lighting Designer & Technical Director: Erik Kuhn.
The process turned adaptation into circulation: text moving between students, incarcerated artists, professional actors, and institutions. The result was a work about law, punishment, gender, authorship, and the terrifying difficulty of changing the story we have inherited.
ELABORATION ON THE PROCESS:
Left to right: Brittany P. as Ismene 4 and Laura H. as Antigone 3 in
as a collaboration between Saint Louis University Theatre and Prison Performing Arts. In 2017, Lucy Cashion and Rachel Tibbetts led weekly poetry, playwriting, and development workshops with participants at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center in Vandalia, Missouri. The group studied the Antigone story, wrote from and against it, and used Sophocles’ tragedy as a structure for thinking about civic law, divine law, gender, punishment, isolation, loyalty, and resistance.
The first public version was produced by SLU Theatre in October 2017 as part of the program’s social justice season. It was not simply a production of Sophocles. The script incorporated writing by SLU students and incarcerated women at WERDCC, making the play both an adaptation and a correspondence across institutional boundaries. In that version, multiple performers embodied Antigone, shifting the figure from a single heroic woman into a shared condition: many women speaking through, beside, and beyond the classical text.
The second stage returned the work to WERDCC in 2018, where PPA participants performed the piece inside the prison. This changed the center of gravity of the project. The women whose writing had helped generate the SLU production were no longer only sources, subjects, or collaborators at a distance; they became the performers of the theatrical event itself. The process moved from adaptation to return: the material went back to the place where much of it had been made.
The final stage was the 2019 ERA/SATE production, developed and performed at The Chapel in St. Louis. By then, the work had become a palimpsest of all three processes: SLU students, incarcerated artists, formerly incarcerated artists, professional performers, Prison Performing Arts, ERA, and SATE. All versions of the play imagined seven Antigones. In the final version, those seven Antigones are incarcerated and sentenced to reenact their story every day until they can discover how to make it end without tragedy.
The piece became less a retelling of Antigone than a formal investigation into repetition, authority, gendered punishment, and the impossibility—and necessity—of changing inherited narratives. It asked who gets to speak Antigone, who gets trapped inside her story, and what has to change for the ending to change.
Digital assets / links worth using
ERA production archive — strongest single source for the final version, credits, production history, collaborators, and source texts. It names the 2017 WERDCC workshop, the 2017 SLU version, the 2018 WERDCC version, and the 2019 ERA/SATE version.
Prison Performing Arts Antigone page — useful for the WERDCC stage of the process. It includes the Spring 2018 WERDCC production, image assets, “Watch Online,” press links, a program link, and audience responses.
PPA blog post: “Antigone Returns to the Stage in August 2019” — very useful for process language. It explains the 2017 workshop, the curation of the women’s writing into a script, the SLU cast performing the work in prison, and the 2018 WERDCC production.
SLU / BroadwayWorld listing for the 2017 production — useful for dates, location, and formal production listing. It gives the SLU performance dates as October 12–15, 2017, at University Theatre in Xavier Hall.
The University News review: “Antigone Themes Still Strike a Chord in Modern Times” — strong for describing what changed in the SLU version: original writing by students and incarcerated women, multiple Antigones, modern dialogue, structural intervention, and the production’s social justice frame.
Snoop’s Theatre Thoughts review of the 2019 ERA/SATE version — useful critical response. It names the piece as by Lucy Cashion and the ensembles at WERDCC, SLU Theatre, SATE, and ERA; describes the “Who is Antigone?” structure; and notes the prison/in-between-state frame, music, percussion, humor, and confrontational style.
Pop Life STL preview/listing — useful for concise production details: dates, venue, cast, live percussion, and the three-stage development history from SLU/PPA to WERDCC to ERA/SATE.
Vimeo archival videos — two Vimeo pages titled ANTIGONE: requiem per Patriarchus, both credited to ERA and the collaborating entities.
Ladue News: “When Caged Birds Sing” — PPA’s page lists this as press for the project.
