Isabelle Huppert has more than a passing acquaintance with women on the razor’s edge. Heck, in “The Piano Teacher,” she worked literally on that edge, slicing and stabbing herself while maintaining her trademark sangfroid. But in the currently touring production of Sarah Kane’s “4.48 Psychose,” she teeters on the edge of sanity without any compensating distraction for the audience. No popcorn, no rapturous Schumann, no flirtation with porn. She just has to talk about killing herself, in French, for nearly two hours. For any other actress, it would be suicide.

Sarah Kane, a brilliant light of the “New Brutalist” movement, took her own life in 1999, leaving behind only a handful of plays. In most of them, she crossed the usual lines of decency with savage scenes of debasement and gore. Like Edward Bond, she used violence both to alarm a complacent audience and as a fairly direct means of allegory. Whether talking about Bosnia in “Blasted” or neo-Nazism in “Skin,” she dealt in the sorts of hatred that demand bloody onstage analogies. But with audiences duly shocked, many of them winced at the gore, closing their eyes to her metaphoric intent.

Her last play, “4:48 Psychosis,” followed a trend that, if she had lived to continue it, might have pulled her out of Bond’s camp into Beckett’s. A disjointed, imagistic journey through the mind of a manic depressive, it seems to record Kane’s final thoughts. She never lived to see it published – by 2000, she had already hanged herself in a hospital bathroom – but simply treating it as her suicide note ignores the play’s technical savvy.

Without a single stage direction, Kane pushes her auditors down a very specific path. Even in a cloud of pain, she has time to make droll jokes at her psychologist’s expense, to long for her lover, or to lampoon her medications and their side effects. In the Royal Court production, which traveled to St. Ann’s last year, the eddies of Kane’s dramaturgy were clear, with distinct voices emerging from the chaos. Unfortunately it also revealed a certain adolescent tone – a cri de coeur can sometimes sound like a whine.

Director Claude Regy’s minimalist version drains out all specificity, turning the sob back into a lion’s roar. On the forestage of the Harvey Theater, Ms. Huppert stands in front of a thick, sparkling, charcoal scrim. It acts as a dense barrier that keeps her separated from the one other actor, Gerard Watkins, who lurks vaguely in dim light. She, however, cannot avoid the spotlight.

For the entire piece, she plants herself down center, never budging from the spot. Her only gestures are little curlings and clenchings of her fingers, perhaps the only way to deploy the astonishing tension that grips her body. She isn’t a tall woman, but she seems to be trying to seem even shorter, jamming her shoulders into an aggressive slouch. It must be tough to maintain; when she left the stage after her bow, she limped from the strain.

Ms. Huppert pronounces her words with nearly insulting care – in a very sick world, students would listen to this monologue in the language lab. She and Kane have only these few words to communicate across a very wide gulf, and Ms. Huppert makes you feel their individual weights. It’s as though we can hear the snap of each fingernail as a woman slowly loses her grip. That makes it unfortunate that most of us understood only one phrase in 10.

BAM’s Joe Melillo, knowing he had a tough sell on his hands, has allowed Mr. Regy to make it even tougher. A surtitle board hangs hopefully above Ms. Huppert, ready and willing to receive translations. But only the barest minimum of Kane’s text transfers to the screen. Tantalizing hints float into view, as though supplying chapter titles above her head. Large sections of the monologues go untranslated, and the non-French speakers are left out to dry.

In a way, it’s a logical extension of Kane’s methodology. Her earlier plays hurled cannibalism scenes at the audience; Mr. Regy insults us much more politely. French, though it totally fails to represent Kane’s Anglo-Saxon outbursts of “flicker punch slash wring slash punch,” sounds like a weapon in Ms. Huppert’s mouth. Even the irritating feeling that we are misunderstanding her, doesn’t seem at all out of place. Kane herself had a cruel approach to narrative – and if we can judge by Ms. Huppert’s grim, flickering smile at the curtain call, she delights in being misunderstood.

Until October 30 (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).