The Hedgehog of Horripilation

It really is in the text. Erin determined it would be a stage direction, so you won't hear it appear in a spoken line (but if you can actually identify the moment of stage direction that the Hedgehog occupies, I will personally give you a Big Prize).

The actual text reads, " Time does not like this remark. Becomes a weasel, or a vicious hedgehog, backs up, puffed up in raging horripilation."

The hedgehog moment isn't funny ... and I can and do absolutely appreciate it as a real direction, a real thought, a moment, an action from Wellman, for whom I have developed an enormous admiration. STILL: the line secrectly cracks me up. A Hedgehog of Horripilation. The words are just funny.

Under less intelligent and confident direction this play would run not just a risk but a likelihood of being intolerably pretentious. It is brilliantly composed, but complicated; the ideas and images in the text are dense. It requires a very skilled director to interpret it in such a way that it will make it alive and immediate in the experience of the audience. Erin is doing this in lots and lots of different ways, and one of the most vital of these is in being alive to the humor that is written into the play, and finding moments where we can interject humor of our own.

Of course I can't tell you about the funny bits because that would spoil them. But they're there! You won't miss them. Slapstick, even. No kidding! Antigone doesn't quite meet Buster Keaton here, but there are moments closer to this than you might think. As a professional clown, thinking about the nature of humor and how it works and doesn't work in performance is part of my job description, and it is often the case that the humor that really hits us deep is intimitely related to the things that make us most uncomfortable, the darkest parts of ourselves, individually and collectively as well. Makes all the more sense to me that Antigone SHOULD meet Buster here ... I think the content of the play is more full that way, more integrated, more real. Melusina and I both bring our clown training and skills to this work, quite directly... and besides having the freedom to do this and the enjoyment of seeing how humor actually amplifies this work - there is the huge joy of working under a director and with a cast who don't take themselves too seriously.

The Hedgehog of Humor! Hooray!

--Clotho, the one who spins