nothing moves antigone

Okay, it's the director here, and I shouldn't be butting in, but people have started coming to rehearsals and telling me what they see. This is an incredibly frightening and exciting moment for me in particular because so much of what I'm asking the actors to do is physicalize verbal puns, ie, create movements that represent things that, if you said them, would allow someone to hear something differently. In several cases, I wanted to keep these words as lines, but they just didn't work, rhythmically, so they became stage directions. One is: "Creon turns on Haemon. Haemon turns on Antigone," which I have directed them to perform as if read "Creon *turns* on Haemon. Haemon turns *on* Antigone. " Another is "Nothing moves us. Nothing moves Antigone" to which I have told her, "The existence of 'nothing-ness' moves you." No one will get that, right, when watching? And sometimes the whole process feels like that—we're embedding layer upon layer of references to pop culture (Tom Waits, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure...), ancient tales (Anansi, Greek legends...), children's books/games (Winnie the Pooh, itsy bitsy spider, ring-around-the-rosy...), and anagrams and on and on and on... so what will people actually take out of it? Turns out, a surprising amount. I heard from a recent college grad that she sees that the Fates aren't human and that the Shriek Operator is controlling them somehow, has some sort of authorial voice to the tale. And today I heard from someone who had seen our postcard (marketing something right is always key to happy audiences), "This Antigone looks really interesting—she looks so feral!" Since that was the one word I could come up with during that photo shoot (Hey Lauri, that's great but can you make it a little less human and a little more feral?), I'm feeling... well, useful. Also feeling lucky I have these four excellent women on stage—their translations of my instructions are sometimes even more interesting than I imagine.