Jude’s adult life in van Hove’s “A Little Life” is full of gifts, even if psychic wounds prevent his enjoying them: spectacular wealth universal lovability (when he wakes up from a medical procedure, his friends tell him “You’re patient. What’s the connection between sainthood and these scars? Is the piece implying a path to exaltation through pain? Is there some kind of flagellant’s spirituality at work here? Jude cuts himself so much and so deeply in van Hove’s production that actors spend significant time mopping the blood-red floor. Francis, too, who manifested Christ’s stigmata. (Jude’s past also sounds like something out of the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue,” another book with a dim view of monasteries.) We know St. Various characters in “A Little Life” suffer in these same ways.
#LITTLE NOI SERIAL#
We surely remember the serial agonies that afflicted Thomas Hardy’s Jude (the obscure one): grim anguish, a lover terrified of sex, the death of his children. In a way, we have been warned that there will be atrocity beyond all reasonable expectation-Yanagihara names her main character Jude St. What do you think happened to him? Unpacked gradually over the course of the evening, it’s a litany of torment: he suffered sexual abuse as a tiny boy in the clutches of evil monks, escaping them only to endure years of more abuse at the hands of his surrogate father, rapist, and pimp Brother Luke (Hans Kesting), escaping him only to be caught, imprisoned, and serially assaulted by a roving psychopath, Dr. He can’t be touched, won’t talk about his childhood, suffers from a persistent weakness in his legs, doesn’t like people to see his naked flesh. He’s mysterious, even to the friends who live with him at various points. If we have learned one thing in the past five years (from “The Inheritance” on Broadway, from Taylor Swift), it is that cardigans mean sorrow.Īfter an early feint toward being a story of four destined-to-be-rich friends-the lawyer Jude (Ramsey Nasr), the painter JB (Majd Mardo), the actor Willem (Maarten Heijmans), and the architect Malcolm (Edwin Jonker)-making it in New York, the play turns its attention to Jude and never looks away.
Then a kindhearted man in a snuggly cardigan wanders centerstage to say he’s popping out on an errand. But the straw moment is easy to see coming: first, Jude says (in Dutch, translated for the audience in English supertitles), “You know, I’ve been lucky all my life.” Uh oh. The director Ivo van Hove’s production with the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam has put the audience at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House through a lot in that time, and depending on viewers’ knowledge of Yanagihara’s brutal plot, some of that taxing material has been a surprise. No, the truck bit comes just a bit later, during the last sliver of the production’s four-hour-and-ten-minute slog. Not to be confused with the car that appears in an eleventh-hour flashback, which explains the mysterious disability of our hero, Jude. The proverbial straw that breaks “A Little Life”-the Dutch stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s maximally tortured, seven-hundred-and-twenty-page blockbuster 2015 novel-is a truck.
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