Here, the voice-overs by Hegel, Virginia Woolf and Bertolt Brecht are a facile diversion. Kreon’s “new powerboat”, Antigone’s “Bingo”, her desire “to lie upon my brother’s body thigh to thigh” are vulgarities which subvert this most adult, unsparingly formal and radiant of masterpieces. Inspired by Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic but incomparable rendition, Heidegger declared the famous choral ode on the nature of man to be the foundational statement in Western civilization. Elizabeth Wyckoff’s version, one among so many, is lucidly attentive. Why Carson’s “customers” instead of “man”? Why this “hilarious cantering” or the all but total omission of the cardinal theme, that of the unhoused wanderer (apolis), outcast from the civic hearth – a theme which crystallizes the Sophoclean reading of the human condition?

¶ 2:00 PM