Director Ivo van Hove is into doing theater in the most extreme way possible. 

His "A Streetcar Named Desire" included full-frontal nudity. He turned "Brokeback Mountain" into an opera. His "Roman Tragedies" runs for nearly six hours without any breaks. 

Hove is the director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Netherlands' largest repertory theater, and they are now presenting Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" at Brooklyn Academy of Music. The play is a masterwork — Kushner won the Pulitzer for it in 1993, it became an HBO mini-series, and it's had several revivals. Van Hove’s version not only doesn't have the classic angels and feathers, it takes place on a very bare stage and it's in Dutch. 

In this interview, van Hove said he always admired the play, and wanted to direct it for a long time. He started with elaborated designs, but when he got to the scene that takes place in the diorama room at the Mormon Visitors Center, he didn’t know how to represent that.

“Then I thought, perhaps it’s just about what is in our minds, what we imagine things to be,” he said. “And actually that’s what the theater always should do, you know, the so-called realism doesn’t exist on the stage, it’s always an illusion.”

Cast from Toneelgroep Amsterdam performing Ivo van Hove's "Angels in America."

(Jan Versweyveld)

Even though "Angels" is set in New York City in 1985 and it’s about AIDS in the age of Ronald Reagan, van Hove thinks the play is universal. “It’s about human beings, small scale,” he said. “But at the same time, and that is the genius of it, it becomes like world drama, bigger than life, and this combination really attracted me a lot.”

Van Hove also has another production currently in New York City: “Scenes From a Marriage,” playing at New York Theater Workshop, is a take on Ingmar Bergman’s landmark television mini-series from 1973. His version has three couples of different ages playing the role of one, and the audience watches their scenes in different orders.

Despite his unconventional choices, van Hove said he is not trying to be provocative. “My productions are like my autobiography. It tells something about myself,” he said.

“For me it means something, there should be an urgency. And when there is an urgency of course you really want to deal with the text in the most unique way possible,” he said. And it has to be meaningful for people today. “I am not interested in a museum piece,” he added.