Riff Raff Tulsa: “Antigone & Ismene”
101 Archer
April 10, 2026
In Riff Raff Tulsa’s recent production Antigone & Ismene, Meagan Mulgrew’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone unfolded not like a distant tragedy but an ever-present one, like something set in motion before the audience even arrived, a story that has been repeating itself long before this particular performance and will continue long after it ends. For Mulgrew, this tale of intimate and civic betrayal, justice, and responsibility becomes less a fixed narrative than an ongoing reckoning, one that implicates both its characters and its audience in the enduring cycle it exposes.
From the beginning of the production, performed in the nontraditional space of 101 Archer’s gallery, the play situated itself within this emotional terrain. Mulgrew’s version opened with Antigone’s sister Ismene (Élle Evans), not as a passive figure, but as someone palpably exhausted by loss, already aware of the weight of what has been passed on to her. She and her sister are the daughters (and sisters) of Oedipus, conceived amid a terrible prophecy; they now live in a Thebes torn apart by that prophecy’s aftermath.
Some of Ismene’s first words here were a plea to “try again,” to somehow go back and make different choices, to save her family, which has inherited generations of trauma that now threaten to break it all over again. These words framed the production in a kind of aching repetition, suggesting that tragedy itself is a cycle that refuses to loosen its grip. Ismene spoke them early on in desperate answer to a simple question: “What would you like to do?” At the play’s close, that question follows Ismene’s plea to “try again,” faintly pointing to the possibility of choice, a small and fragile opening through which that cycle might, however imperfectly, be interrupted. But the cost to get to that choice is high and heavy.
Mulgrew, who directed as well as adapted this play, made this sense of inevitability almost suffocating by using a theatrical device traditional to Greek tragedy: the chorus, which she deployed confidently and creatively. This group of masked faceless bodies moved with unsettling silence through the background, never speaking, never intervening, but never allowing the audience to forget them as they seemed to anticipate every moment of collapse.
They began the play by embodying the story of Oedipus, physically tracing the origins of the family’s suffering, orienting the audience through controlled, expressive, and often unsettling movement (Maree ReMalia did the movement direction). From that point forward they reappeared periodically, circling characters as they made decisions, closing in on them in eerie ways that felt both protective and predatory, as though the past itself were watching and waiting. The moment of Antigone’s death near the end of the play was marked not by a grand gesture or a noble speech, but by the simple extinguishing of a light surrounded by the chorus: a quiet, almost ritualistic act that made her death feel both inevitable and hauntingly impersonal, as though it has been decided long before she stepped onto that stage.