Head games Ismene explores life after Oedipus BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Ismene Written and directed by David Eliet. With Laura Wood, Bob Jaffe, and Valerie Remillard Myette. At the Rhode Island Theatre Ensemble through April 16.

Ancient kings die as ancient kings live and decree, well away from our sort. So whether Creon of Thebes died with a frown or a smile means little to us. But what about the fate of Ismene, the only other family member remaining after the tragedy of Oedipus played out? The young woman was afraid of disobeying King Creon’s edict when her sister Antigone stole out to bury their brother. That’s a person on our human scale, someone we might want to wonder about.

David Eliet’s Ismene imagines the conclusion of the Oedipus family saga, which Sophocles left unresolved. King Creon and Ismene were the only royalty standing when the mortals were through acting out fates that the gods had in store for them.

As the play opens, we find Ismene (Laura Wood) concluding a year of mourning by ripping the shroud from a mirror and declaring that she will once again wear white. Oh no she won’t, Creon (Bob Jaffe) informs her, glowering up from his game of solitaire. And so ensues their inward spiral dance of threats and recriminations.

The story to that point had the dire inevitability of a cart careening down Mt. Olympus. Having unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, as was foretold, Oedipus wandered Greece as a blind beggar, leaving the ruling of Thebes to be shared by sons Polynices and Eteocles. The latter kept the throne to himself and exiled his brother, who returned with an army. They killed each other in the ensuing battle. Their uncle Creon was now king and forbade anyone to bury the city’s attacker, Polynices. His sister Antigone defiantly did so anyway, as fealty to the gods and duty to her brother demanded. She did not convince her sister, Ismene, to join her. Creon punished Antigone by sealing her alive in a cave.

So we now find Ismene casting off her mourning and choosing life, as she had before in refusing to join her sister in a suicidal act. "I am young and I am beautiful," she announces. "I will go out into the fields and feel the grass beneath my feet." A one-person chorus is dressed as a servant (Valerie Remillard Myette) and punctuates the play throughout with variations on a nagging question that would be at the back of the surviving sister’s mind: "What do you do now, Ismene? How do you say yes to Antigone now that she’s in her grave?" Her carpe diem attitude is extremely expressed, as befits someone representing a way of life. Ismene goes so far as to try to seduce her uncle, first apparently on a whim and only later as a key to her escape.

For his part, Creon argues as forcefully against the hedonistic self-concern for which Ismene waves a banner. His cautiousness has not proceeded from loss of faith in the gods, he says to her accusation, but because he has lost faith in meaning. He no longer knows what the gods want or even if they care. Ismene wants to evoke feeling in him. He wants to provoke her to derive thought and meaning from her impulses.

The acting is superb all around. As Ismene, Wood is intelligently cast, imparting spirit and a sense of vivid presence to even dour pronouncements. Jaffe’s Creon gives us a wider range than the anger and sorrow that some lines could confine him to, yet he never reduces the nobleman to pathos. Even Myette as the commentator provides an appropriate tone of curiosity instead of stagy formality. And the costume design by Marilyn Salvatore enhances rather than distracts: crushed black velvet is perfect for a kingly robe in this setting.

Besides its first-act repetitiousness, a significant weakness of Ismene is that our two royal remnants reverse their decisions — a lot — not in response to the other person’s action, however misconstrued, but out of changes of mind. These two become the playwright’s puppets, and not as characters in Greek plays found themselves manipulated by the gods. No, those follies resulted from tragic flaws — pride, avarice, the usual cross-cultural litany. In this play, Ismene and Creon sometimes signal purposeful motives but largely they just enjoy messing with each other’s minds. But that would be trivial, and these are not trivial people but rather representatives of modes of human potential. Playwright Eliet needed a good dramaturg, someone who would help keep these two committed to their own initial distorted perceptions.

Well worth seeing, Ismene presents an absorbing question: how can two headstrong, flinty adversaries, rattling around confined together, strike sparks in each other’s hearts? The play could have been a psychologically insightful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? instead of closer to a Greek The Bickersons.