Mary Norris on the Late John Bennet and Their Trip to See Antigone at Opus 40, the Senior Project of Francis Karagodins ’22, for the New Yorker

“Sophocles had no trouble with structure,” writes Mary Norris for the New Yorker, struggling to find a way into her own tale. Taking a page from the late John Bennet, her friend and longtime editor for the New Yorker, Norris started at the beginning, telling the story of her trip to see Antigone with Bennet before his recent death. The Senior Project of Francis Karagodins ’22, Antigone, based on an original translation by Karagodins, was staged outdoors at Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, the sculpture park and museum created by the late Bard professor and alumnus Harvey Fite ’30. “The setting was evocative: birdsong and scudding clouds at twilight, with the mountains for a backdrop,” Norris writes. While Bennet was studied in the play, Norris found herself more unfamiliar, and as such found Tiresias’s entrance to be the play’s most startling development. “While the other performers all seemed afraid of stumbling on the paving stones (Fite actually died of a fall in his own quarry), Tiresias alone, blind and urgent, had a motive to place each foot squarely on the earth.” Shortly after the two saw Antigone, Bennet was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “Two weeks later, on July 9, he died, at home,” Norris writes, “releasing a great commingling of sadness and gratitude among family and friends, our lives graven where his plow had gone.”

Post Date: 07-19-2022