To find the Abingdon theater, where One Year Lease is reviving Jean Anouilh's 1944 re-imagination of Antigone, I had to walk through some of New York's first postcards from the Republican National Convention.

Mazes of steel crowd-control fences partitioned the sidewalks, while jersey barriers topped by two-foot iron grates blocked off Seventh Avenue. In the street, police in riot gear shoved flexi-cuffed people into busses, while officers with nightsticks pushed the crowd through the caged-in sidewalks.

Cops shouted warnings at passers-by who allowed their eyes to flicker up from the ground to the scene in the street; those who paused were escorted away. Officers on motor scooters patrolled the surrounding streets in squads of twenty or more.

It is possible that this show of police power was purely innocuous, but it was no accident that I saw it. The time and the location of this production of Antigone were carefully chosen and the juxtaposition was strikingly effective. Walking through police roadblocks to see the story of Antigone, a young woman who finds the workings of the social machine so odious she sees no option but to throw her body into its cogs, is enough to start even a moderate thinking in manifestos.

Antigone is one of six shows that make up the UnConvention, a festival of theater-of-protest and political activism staged as a counterweight to the Republican National Convention.

Anouilh's re-writing of Sophocles' play about the Theban royal family was done to protest the collaborationist government of German-occupied France, and the result is arguably one of the best and most important plays of the 20th century. An intellectual treatise that confronts rationalism with existentialism, Anouilh's Antigone explores the insoluble contradictions between radical individualism and a social contract that readily collapses into the schizophrenia of fascism.

One Year Lease strips this drama down to its barest essentials with a series of theatrical tricks alternately inspired and inadequate.

Their production is set in Baghdad, and opens with a recording of a letter written by a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in the Sunni Triangle. This is a complicated re-alignment, since there is little situational correlation between the events of the play and the events of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It would be easy to portray the tyrant Creon as a stand-in for the U.S. administration in Iraq-the play was, after all, written to oppose an occupying government-but such a literal metaphor would be difficult to maintain.

Instead, Creon, portrayed by actress Ariane Barbanell, is an Arab leader, trying to control her own rebellious people. The Baghdad setting works, in part, because it is what we expect of a piece of political theater in today's charged climate. It brings the story into the world of modern politics while still refraining from cheap political sniping.

Some of the other conceptual touches do not work as well. In some scenes actors speak lines in the original French, in others, in Greek. While the performers keep the narrative flow clear throughout, the purpose of the linguistic exercise eludes me.

In another "concept," the characters who attempt to dissuade Antigone from her rebellion against Creon are represented only by recorded voices, in an attempt, perhaps, to reassign those character's voices to the machine they have chosen to participate in, "the state." Actress Tella Storey's portrayal of Antigone is strong, but with only a bag of sand and a tape recorder to play with, even she cannot make the scene work.

The fact that some scenes fall flat, however, becomes almost irrelevant, because they are essentially exposition. The drama here is Antigone versus Creon; their scene together is the play itself, and Barbanell and Storey make the explosion happen without pity or remorse. They play the pure and violent heart of the conflict between an aging tyrant and the one thing he cannot understand or control: a human being, not a subject, willing to die rather than accept being governed.

When I left the theater the streets had resumed a calmer aspect, but the message of the play was still as clear as a shot in the face. The existence of the state imposes a choice on each of us. We are either Creon or we are Antigone. The moment is coming when we will have to live out the choice we make.