Artistic director Curt Columbus, left, with director Brian McEleney during a rehearsal.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

For the opening of its season, Trinity Rep has turned to the ancient Greeks. But, said the theater’s creative head, Curt Columbus, there won’t be a toga in sight.

No, the theater starts its season Friday with a modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone, penned by Columbus and directed by company member Brian McEleney. In this case, a thirty-something Antigone is a recovering drunk who has just come off a 15-year bender.

Columbus, who began working on The Dreams of Antigone last fall, has pared the play down from two acts and more than two hours to one lean 85-minute act.

“I think this is the type of thing that most resembles my Crime and Punishment adaptation, a kind of pot boiler where you’re in a room and it happens in front of you, big ideas, big drama, all right there. Hopefully, it will zoom by and you’ll leave kind of sweating.

“I want it to be fun, fast, alive, vibrant and juicy.”

Columbus said the same basic “tent poles” of the classic Antigone story are present in his play, but unfold in different ways.

He said that holding to a longstanding Trinity tradition, he has taken the Greek tragedy, smashed it on the ground, picked up some shards and said, “Look at this.”

In Sophocles’ play, Antigone is sentenced to death after defying Creon, successor to her father Oedipus as king of Thebes. In the wake of a civil war, Antigone’s two brothers have killed one another. Creon decrees that Polyneices, the brother who started the conflict, be left unburied as carrion for animals.

But Antigone goes against his wishes and buries her brother anyway. Creon in turn buries her alive in a cave, but changes his mind after a soothsayer warns him that the gods are on Antigone’s side.

But it is too late. Antigone has hanged herself, and Haemon, her fiancé and Creon’s son, has committed suicide after discovering her. Also, Creon’s distraught wife Eurydice kills herself.

But Columbus’s play, which is set in an ancient Greek theater undergoing refurbishing, is not quite so grim. Antigone is taken away, but we don’t know whether she dies, he said.

Then again, as of last week the ending was still up in the air, with Columbus doing rewrites at 5 in the morning on his porch.

It’s a play that asks whether one person can change the world, a play in which a community wrestles with difficult questions.

In Columbus’ version Antigone is a revolutionary figure who confronts the government and demands change.

“I hope people will respond to this the way they did with Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard a couple of years ago,” he said, “that they will come in with their preconceptions and have them swept away fairly quickly and say this is not what we expected.

“It’s much more alive, contemporary and funny. All those things.”

Columbus said he has always envisioned The Dreams of Antigone as a project written for and with the resident acting company. He has worked up scenes by taking them around Rhode Island and performing them for subscribers. Recently he and company members have been to the Post Office Café in East Greenwich and Bristol’s Linden Place.

He said the process is a little like what he imaged Shakespeare went through when writing plays. “You can imagine [actor Richard] Burbage walking in and saying, ‘Bill, this is ridiculous. I can’t say these words.’ And a new speech for Lear was born.”

He said he wanted his work and the actors’ to be indistinguishable.

During his tour of the state playing to subscribers, Columbus said, he has gotten considerable feedback. One woman told him what she saw resembled a cross between The Sopranos and The West Wing.

“It’s about family,” said the woman, “and I didn’t know it was going to be a family drama.”

A man told him the action seemed “ripped from headlines,” which Columbus thought was a good thing for a 2,500-year-old tale.

Columbus describes his work as Antigone meets 1984 and the movie Brazil in Gosford Park.

“There is this whole upstairs-downstairs thing going on,” he said.

But the play is also about heroes, about the blurry line between who’s right and who’s wrong. At one point the play (at least for now) contains a list of names of the famous and infamous, all of whom represent Antigone, both in positive and negative aspects.

Jailed Mormon fundamentalist Warren Jeffs, for example, may be a hero to some and a villain to others. Heroes are guided by a belief in a sacred mission, the play states, a belief that they are right when others feel they are wrong.

Columbus said that Antigone is right to want to honor her dead brother, but Creon, who is normally considered to be in the wrong, also deserves credit for trying to run the government, trying to keep order. He is trying to bring a country that has just endured a civil war back together, said Columbus.

“A hero is a complicated thing,” he said. “And Antigone is complicated. It’s not just that she is defiant, that she is right. It’s not that simple.”

“We’re trying to understand the complicated American question of what is a hero.”

Columbus said he wants his play to seem both ancient and modern.

“I want the play to ring bells for people about things in their own lives,” he said. “It’s not whether Antigone was right 2,500 years ago, but is there something that is awakened in you when you hear the story.”

The Dreams of Antigone opens in previews Friday and runs through Oct. 26 in Trinity Rep’s downstairs theater. Tickets are $20-$60 and pay-what-you-can for Sept. 19. The new curtain time for all evening performances is 7:30 p.m. Call 351-4242 or log on to www.trinityrep.com.

cgray@projo.com