Red-Hot Savagery: Ivo van Hove’s A Little Life at BAM’s Next Wave Festival

There are those who hate Hanya Yanagihara’s wrenching 2015 novel A Little Life. The term most often leveled against it by the opposition is “trauma porn,” citing the extraordinary onslaught of horrors experienced by protagonist Jude St. Francis throughout his childhood and the three decades of PTSD-soaked adulthood charted in the book.

Count this critic among the faithful. While A Little Life may be difficult to read, Yanagihara’s gorgeous, tender prose, her careful attention to the long, ruthless tendrils of her main character’s trauma, and her fascination not just with Jude but with each of her warmly drawn characters wraps the epic-sized book’s brutality in a palatable, empathetic gauze.

But there’s no beauty and very little tenderness to be found in the theatrical adaptation, now playing at BAM’s Next Wave Festival through October 29, courtesy of the similarly divisive Belgian director Ivo van Hove, via his Dutch-language theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam. This is a production that stages, in some ways, what A Little Life’s detractors claim the novel to be: a cold and intentionally ugly amoral abyss of despair.

From the start of the play, as in the book, Jude (Ramsey Nasr) is the odd one out among his close-knit friend group setting out in New York City in early adulthood. Actor Willem (Maarten Heijmans), architect Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), and painter JB (Majd Mardo) share everything with each other but know nothing about Jude: not his race, not his sexuality, not who his parents were or how his legs were so maimed before they all met at college.

At times, it feels like van Hove and playwright Koen Tachelet have adapted the Wikipedia synopsis of A Little Life rather than the book itself. They certainly haven’t missed any of the scenes of child abuse, self-harm, or assault for which the book may be best known, and these are dramatized with increasingly queasy realism. Van Hove seems to be most invested in A Little Life’s plot except that, for the most part, there isn’t one: The flashbacks and acts of self-destruction that dot Jude’s psychological journey in Yanagihara’s novel now become an endless chronology—the running time is over four hours—of upsetting episodes that, quite literally, bleed together. It’s a striking, if unsubtle, gesture that Jude’s shirt gradually grows bloodier across the hours, his body a palimpsest for the historical harm he’s endured.

While the production gestures toward the centrality of the quartet whose friendship grounds the book, Malcolm and JB are swiftly forgotten; book passages from their perspectives are repurposed as clunky dialogue, disposing with Yanagihara’s clear distance between how her characters present themselves and who they really are. But the grosser oversight is the sidelining of Willem, Jude’s closest friend and would-be savior. This adaptation can’t stop making time for torture, but there’s somehow no space for the story’s most important relationship to develop before it takes a surprising turn in the second half, one that relies on our deep investment in the pair’s mutual fidelity. In the play’s few endearing exchanges, Nasr and Heijmans are lovely together, but their affection feels unprepared and unearned by the text.

With everyone else’s backstories excised and interiorities erased, A Little Life becomes all about Jude from the beginning. That makes a certain sense, as he’s the mysterious one, the damaged one, the one calling out for soliloquy, and Nasr vibrates with a violent ardor through each of Jude’s accumulating agonies. But it also misses the point: that the redemptive element of the novel is the community of care that surrounds Jude, the willingness of others to sublimate their storylines, ultimately, for his. The adaptation even strips Jude of his brilliance. For one, there’s almost no reference to Jude’s celebrated legal career, and it seems as if he exists only to deteriorate. In this version, Jude feels hopelessly alone from start to finish—and so do we.

Jude isn’t completely solitary, of course. He’s haunted by the specter of an abusive priest (Hans Kesting, who plays the parts of two other abusers) from his childhood and by the guiding voice of a social worker, Ana (Marieke Heebink), from his adolescence who rehabilitated him and knows more of his story than anyone else does. While Yanagihara keeps her female characters intentionally thinly sketched, focused as she is on masculinity and male relationships, it’s still not ideal that the only woman on stage here is basically a figment of Jude’s imagination.

Just as many bad things happen in the novel, but its tragedies don’t strike with an unreadable relentlessness, nested as they are in the feathers of Yanighara’s compassionate prose which sparkles in the spaces between the darkness as if demanding the reader not quite give up hope just yet. In the midst of so much humanity, the book’s crushing finale hits hard. But instead of featherbed, van Hove’s only modes of expression are red-hot savagery and metallic dullness. Here, the stage seems to almost sag when Jude isn’t actively suffering.

While van Hove’s extensive use of video has often been overwhelming, as in his pre-pandemic Broadway revival of West Side Story at the Broadway Theatre, the screens here feel inert. Mark Thewessen and Jan Versweyveld’s four-hour projections of slow-motion NYC streets do little to set the scene. All the while, a live string quartet—playing a mixture of Mozart, Mahler, and atmospheric dissonances—evokes nothing less than a horror film’s soundtrack.

A refrain often heard from A Little Life’s devotees is that they first read it incredibly quickly, sometimes in days. I don’t think that’s because of any sick voyeuristic pleasure at reading Jude’s pain. Jude constantly marvels at how the people who love him—Willem; Harold (Jacob Derwig), a law professor who cares for Jude as his own son; Andy (Bart Slegers), a doctor dedicated to Jude’s care—never abandon him, no matter how much he tries to prove his worthlessness to them. In sticking with Jude, the reader also chooses to continue bearing witness, chooses to stay. Does the novel invite a sort of self-congratulating and virtue-signaling as if by remaining with it, a reader can demonstrate the kind of friend they’d imagine themselves to be in real life?

Perhaps, but there are worse things. There’s something about seeing this story on stage that aligns the audience not with Jude’s generous friends but with Jude himself, constantly held captive, either by his memories or by flesh-and-blood monsters. A Little Life subjects its audiences to graphic horrors again and again with scant warning: Watching the play is squirmingly uncomfortable in a way that reading the book never is. You can’t just shut the book this time, but you can, if you’re the type, walk out, as many audience members do, some in the middle of the most gruesomely anguished scenes, as if to assert their ability to take some action against the play’s hopelessness, turning their backs on a pale desolation that offers no reprieve.

A Little Life runs through October 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House.