Find an event
The Last Daughter of Oedipus
Mickelson follows gamely in the footsteps of Sophocles. Her debut picks up where the playwright’s Antigone leaves off: Antigone and her brothers dead, destroyed by the cycle of blood and betrayal set off by their parents’ incest, and Oedipus’ eldest daughter, Ismene, left the sole survivor of the family’s self-destruction. As played by Kimberly Logan, Ismene’s a nervous girl, dogged by waking nightmares and goaded by survivor’s guilt into a midnight run from her home city of Thebes.
There’s a sense of chance and abandoned plotlines surrounding Ismene’s journey, as she takes on a traveling companion, determines to stop an impending war with Athens, and is taken hostage and frog-marched to Delphi. Yet richly physical staging, the company’s hallmark, adds a unifying energy to the text. It comes alive in movement director Mercedes Rohlfs’s beautifully blocked dream sequences, in which Ismene is manipulated by a trio of Furies, and in a visit with the oracle at Delphi. The latter showcases the greatest strengths of both the script and the staging, spiking a visitation by Apollo with menace and visual gags. But company member Mickelson, in the second production to emerge from Babes With Blades’ workshop program, seems more interested in exploring issues of self-determination and the origins of the Oedipus myth than in her own story’s dramatic possibilities. The play culminates in a sort of kangaroo court of the underworld, which answers questions the audience hasn’t been persuaded to care about.
