The experimental writer-performer Annie Saunders does not dispute the bravery of that act of devotion. But in “Our Country,” a somewhat ungainly examination of Saunders’s bond with and duty toward her own legally beleaguered younger brother, she suggests there might be another way of looking at Antigone’s self-sacrifice.
“I just wonder, has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe that was not her job?” she says. “Like maybe she could have just lived her life?”
Saunders, who created “Our Country” with its director, Becca Wolff, knows it isn’t that simple — that love, a shared past and the pull of familial obligation can conspire otherwise. When the age gap between siblings is wide enough, as it is between her and her brother, Rafe (Jesse Saler), the older one has memories stretching back to the younger’s arrival.
“When you were a baby I took you for show and tell, when you were born,” Saunders says. “Did you know that?”
“‘This is my brother. Everybody line up and pet him,’” Rafe says, teasing her gently, disarmingly.
“Our Country,” at the Public Theater, takes much of its dialogue from recordings that Saunders made, with her brother’s consent, of conversations between them. She, a Los Angeles artist, tries to understand him, an anti-establishment, pro-gun, Northern California marijuana farmer with a checkered legal past cleaned up by clever attorneys. Now he’s “in hotter water than usual,” she says: facing charges that might put him in prison. She’s been asked, by their lawyer mother, to write a letter in support of him.
“Do you concede that you are having a particularly Caucasian experience of our criminal justice system?” Saunders asks, and Rafe pushes her off her high horse immediately.
