In a recent essay for the New York Times, the novelist Tom McCarthy connected Greece’s recent economic woes to Greek tragedy. “At the basis of all economics is the practice of keeping one’s house in order,” he wrote. “This is what virtually all Greek drama is about: the attempt to manage domestic affairs, whether ‘domestic’ be understood at the scale of one household, or of a family spanning several generations … , or of the literal stones and mortar of a home — the attempt to quell its rebellions from within, fend off attacks from without, keep it self-contained, autonomous, intact.”This connection between capital and familial chaos, between the modern and the ancient, is seductively presented in director Ivo van Hove’s production of “Antigone” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which runs through October 4 as part of the Next Wave Festival. Working with a new translation by the poet Anne Carson (her second, following “Antigonick,” the “comic book” version published by New Directions in 2012) and with Juliette Binoche in the title role, van Hove offers a sleek, financial-district version of Sophokles’s drama in which, although anger is still expressed, the characters have been numbed by the cycles of violence in which they are trapped.What this means is that emotion is not the main concern. There is screaming, and Binoche falls to the floor a few times in agony, but these moments are not cathartic. This constraint is also conveyed through the design, which strips away anything that isn’t essential from the stage. We’re left with a minimalist void, a space that is dark, muddy, clad in shades of gray, with a sun that hangs over the characters and shifts from bright to dark, depending on the scene. Projected on the back wall of the stage are out-of-focus modern street scenes, the first obvious link the play makes between the past and present. At the front are a few chairs and a black leather couch that resemble boardroom furniture. Kreon (Patrick O'Kane), the man who orders Antigone’s death, towers over the other characters in his slim-fit suit like a stolid corporate lawyer.The balance between the old and new in “Antigone” is destabilizing in the best possible way. It draws connections, creates resonances with the contemporary world without making them obvious. It’s not one thrown against the other, a clash of two extremes, but something in between — the merging of two distinct periods and styles into a new whole. So when a modern song begins to play during the finale, slowly becoming louder and louder until it drowns out the action on stage, it doesn’t feel out of place (I won’t say what song; it is both surprising and inevitable). The juxtaposition works because it is part of the fabric of the work, a way of looking at themes that are ancient but always fresh.
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