Widely regarded as the founding text of Western tragedy, Sophocles' Antigone has spoken to every generation that has ever weighed conscience against the law. Lumen Rep's ANTIGONE: UNMASKED is a new contemporary adaptation, written and directed by Brian Niece*, that transplants that ancient reckoning into an unnamed country close enough to recognize. Staged across three distinct playing spaces, an elevated platform of official power, a threshold ramp of negotiation and witness, and a circle of truth and human consequence, the production folds the audience into the story as citizens of the country onstage, watched over by a masked chorus of apprentices who never quite look away.

In the wake of a civil war, a leader has mistaken order for justice, and a woman has decided that her brother's body will not go unburied, whatever the law says. As the state moves to make an example of her, the play widens into unnerving and deeply human territory, asking what a community owes its dead, what it owes its truth tellers, and how easily the machinery of order can come to matter more than the people inside it. And it raises the question underneath every version of this story ever told: what does it cost to say the truth out loud?