Antigone at BAM Harvey Theater

Should love or law guarantee the dignity of the dead? With unvarnished intensity, Oscar-winning actor Juliette Binoche (In-I, 2009 Next Wave), Olivier-winning director Ivo van Hove (Angels in America, 2014 Next Wave), and poet and MacArthur fellow Anne Carson—offering a new colloquial translation—pare Sophokles’ great question to the tragic bone. In Thebes, Antigone has refuted King Kreon’s (Patrick O’Kane) order: that her traitorous brother’s body be left to rot outside the city gates. Vast monochrome videoscapes of sun and moon, sand and snow provide the backdrop to Van Hove’s taut, unsentimental account of a woman who, as removed from life as she is from death, ends up taking both into her own hands.