Kreon

A few years ago, a friend went to an academic conference and saw a reading of Anne Carson’s adaptation of “Antigone,” with the celebrated academic Judith Butler as the Theban king Kreon.

Rendering the tale of Antigone, who tries to bury her brother Polyneikes in defiance of Thebes’ king, Kreon, Carson makes her characters aware of their own cultural echoes over the years: Speakers allude to the likes of intellectual-history boldface names Lacan and Hegel.

And Crane is hilarious as Kreon, with crisp diction and rigid physicality capturing the character’s blinkered smugness.

At one point, after Kreon has reeled off a list of nouns and verbs that express his ethos, the chorus quibbles that the possessive pronoun “mine” isn’t a noun.

A messenger’s deliveries are so dry they’re almost dead, and the frame practically freezes on the stereotypical macho posturing of Kreon, a whopping misogynist whose biggest beef often seems to be that he can’t lose to a woman.