Theatergoers may identify with Anne (Emma D’Arcy) if they have had to deal with a family member during a crisis who showed no interest in collaboration or compromise, only wanting to be in control. “It’s not fair that you get to decide on behalf of everyone,” she tells her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies.) 

Others may sympathize with Chris if they have had to deal with an unstable relative: “We need to move on, and so do you,” he says to her.

The two are arguing over a funeral urn  in “The Other Place,” a play opening tonight at The Shed written and directed by Alexander Zeldin,  a British theater artist who is probably best known on this side of the Atlantic for “Love,” depicting the day-in/day-out lives of characters in a homeless shelter.  “The Other Place” is at its best an intensely acted exploration of grief and family dynamics.  But the play is inspired by Sophocles’ “Antigone,” and Zeldin’s loyalty to Ancient Greek tragedy sometimes makes for an awkward fit, as it did in a different way in the just-concluded Broadway run of Robert Icke’s “Oedipus,”  another 2,500-year-old tragedy by Sophocles set in modern times.

The funeral urn contains the ashes of Anne’s father, who committed suicide a decade ago. Chris has lived ever since then in his brother’s old house with his new wife and stepson – and with those ashes. He has decided to renovate the house, and get rid of the ashes, by ceremoniously spreading them in a nearby park. His wife Erica (Lorna Brown) invites Anne for the ceremony. Anne, who has been estranged from the rest of the family for many years, returns to her childhood home  and demands that the ashes stay where they are. That’s the central conflict of the play, a fight that occasionally dips into comedy, but is ultimately a stand-in for deeper, darker issues.

Anne, we soon learn, has a history of mental health issues. (It’s interesting that Sharr White wrote another play entitled “The Other Place,” which ran on Broadway in 2013 starring Laurie Metcalf  as a character who we eventually realize is suffering from dementia. )

Zeldin insists in a program note that his play’s connection to Sophocles’ is about the grief; that it is not “a ‘version’ of Antigone, or a retelling of it for a modern audience or anything like that.” 

But there are some obvious nods that belie his claim.  Antigone’s sister Ismene has become Anne’s sister Issy (Ruby Stokes), and there is an older family friend, Terry (Jerry Killick), who shares a name if nothing else with the blind prophet Tiresias. Terry is the project manager for the remodeling, but if there is any point to his inclusion in the play, it’s likely to be the scene in which he tries to put the make on Issy. It  occurred to me that Zeldin might intend this scene to be a “prophecy” of sorts – a foreshadowing of the major revelation later in the play.  To give details would spoil what’s clearly an effort to shock the audience. I’ll say only that it harkens back to Sophocles’ original Oedipus trilogy, undermining present-day plausibility.

In Sophocles’ play, Antigone has buried her brother Polynices, although her uncle, King Creon, has expressly forbidden anybody to do so. Antigone’s reasons for having disobeyed Creon’s law are largely moral or religious; Creon’s reasons for having forbidden her actions are political.  But  in Zeldin’s play, both Anne’s and Chris’s motives for their fight over the ashes seem entirely emotional. That is another way of saying they are unclear, but the lack of clarity may have less to do with any flaws in Zeldin’s writing than in the generally muddled state of modern life. 

It is not inaccurate to call “The Other Place” taut and tense, a showcase for D’Arcy’s embodiment of stress and Menzie’s eventual explosive expression of guilt, aided by the insistence of Yannis Philippakis’ electronic score and the persistence Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design (which includes endless startling pings from cell phone messages.). But Zeldin’s skill as a director in dramatizing the everyday is on display in the performances of the other cast members, especially Lee Braithwaite as the stepson Leni, who  even in his smallest and seemingly most random of movement reveal his place in the hierarchy of the family.

The Other Place
The Shed through March 1
Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $25 – $119
Written and directed by Alexander Zeldin
Original music by Yannis Philippakis, set and costume design by Rosanna Vize, lighting design by James Farncombe, sound design by Josh Anio Grigg
Cast: Lee Braithwaite as Leni, Lorna Brown as Erica, Emma D’Arcy as Anne, Jerry Killick as Terry, Tobias Menzies as Chris, and Ruby Stokes as Issy