Here’s where I have to admit that I never finished reading A Little Life. I got about three-quarters of the way through Hanya Yanagihara’s miserablist epic back when it was the book of the moment in 2015, but I got so exhausted by its repetitive descriptions of abuse, self-harm, and luxury goods that I had to shelve it midway. Lucky for me, watching Ivo van Hove’s more-than-four-hour Dutch stage adaptation of the novel, now onstage at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, made it clear I hadn’t missed anything. The thing is so long, so cruel, so exhausting, and so finely aestheticized that I had to wonder if all involved had verged into self-parody.
The book, for those who managed to avoid the obligation of having to talk about it on dates over the past seven years, starts off as a post-grad tale about four starry-eyed guys making their way in New York in various creative careers (think The Group, or un-reverse Merrily We Roll Along). But it soon reveals its primary interest in Jude St. Francis, preternaturally beautiful and perpetually in crisis, who has been concealing a childhood full of horrific molestation from the rest of the group. The story lives in a sort of eternal early–de Blasio–era prettified Manhattan, and as time passes and the members of the quartet become increasingly successful — in architecture, acting, visual art, and law — you learn more and more of the brutality Jude has experienced. The wealth and success are like gauze around a seeping wound.
Van Hove, no fan of niceties, accelerates his adaptation (the script is by Koen Tachelet, translated while the concept and direction is van Hove’s) so that the play gets to Jude’s agony faster. The staging, with design by his longtime partner Jan Versweyveld, arranges Jude’s friends’ accoutrements — a kitchen island, a table with an architectural model, painted canvases — laid out in quadrants around a solitary sink and a smear of red upon the floor that, it quickly becomes clear, is blood. (It’s like a Hungry Hungry Hippos board, but with trauma.) The first scenes sprint through the first hundred or so pages of Yanagihara’s book, full of proper nouns, class signifiers, and bitchery (though Queer Eye’s Antoni would be pleased to learn that several references to gougères survive) to get to van Hove’s real interest, which is of course the torture and the suffering.
In those scenes, Ramsey Nasr, playing Jude, retreats to that sink, cuts himself, and flashes back to repressed memories. Nasr played Jude’s near-opposite in the ever-rising Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, and he commits utterly to playing this implausibly perfect victim of a character. He’s at the defensive as an adult, and then suddenly believably artless as a young boy, nurtured and then stolen and sold to other older men by his onetime teacher Brother Luke. Hans Kesting, hulking like a gothic arch, plays several of Jude’s tormentors, and Marieke Heebink, the sole woman in the cast, is his caseworker/the narrator/a seeming avatar of Yanagihara herself, prodding Jude to heal and then prepare for the next battering.
My colleague Andrea Long Chu described Yanagihara as a “sinister kind of caretaker†as an author, punishing Jude and nursing him back to life, and van Hove seems to want to implicate the rest of the cast and the audience in that process. There is a ritualistic feeling to the experience. Van Hove situates a portion of the audience onstage, so that the crowd faces each other, watching helplessly as Jude self-harms and is raped again and again. He then holds everyone there to watch actors appear with rags and cleaning supplies, clearing the blood from the floor each time — though Nasr himself stays bloody, more and more red marks staining his white shirt as the action progresses. There’s a screen on either side of the stage, displaying slow-motion video of the streets of New York, which speeds up and pixelates when Jude is near self-harm. A quartet called BL!NDMAN [strings] accompanies the pain with plaintive harmonics. It also accompanies Jude as he sings a bit of Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,†in case you had not already grasped the seriousness already.
You would be entirely forgiven for finding that all just too much. When I saw the performance, there were walkouts nearly throughout. At intermission, I heard one older gay man tell his partner, “We’ll just say we stayed for the second act and it was wonderful†as they strolled off into the night. Van Hove’s rendering of Jude’s suffering seems visceral, initially, but he, like Yanagihara, returns to it so often you begin to feel increasingly distant from it — the effect is intradermal, between the layers of the skin, not cutting to the bone. Jude has a line about trying to process his experience with “the film methodâ€: “You relive your memories until they become meaningless,†which seems to be exactly what the production is doing. Jude claims that those images will still haunt you as you sleep, but I’m not quite sure that van Hove has given them that additional oomph. By the second act, as things get crueler yet, some of the abstracted staging felt simply absurd. During a depiction of a car crash, as an actor with a headlight in hand pointed it grimly at Jude, I had to stifle a grim laugh.
A Little Life onstage makes it all the more obvious that this plot is really a Passion Play, with Jude as the ever-suffering lamb taking on the collective woe of the urban gay intelligentsia (not to mention that half the audience resembled characters from the play). It’s a sacrificial story for a time without God, but with PrEP, puff pastries, and Architectural Digest. Somehow, there’s an aesthetic kinship between van Hove’s production and The Inheritance, another sprawling play about pretty, queer men with terrible relationships to sex — I imagine the characters in both might brunch together in Soho — in that the two dramas seem to ponder the question of “Sure, we have nice things, but have we suffered for them enough?†A Little Life has no historical or sociological anchoring, no interest in the structures that perpetuate clerical predation or stigmatize queerness and venereal disease, no heft to it all. (Van Hove at least had that with The Damned.) In his notes on the production, he refers to the novel as a “perfect diamond†— a complimentary line, I think, but one to me that captures the way it all feels compressed upon itself into a crystal. This pain is collectible. It’s just another objet d’art.