![]() ![]() “My theater is really visceral,” van Hove says. (Depictions of physical miseries aside, the audience has to multitask for the entirety of the long and difficult running time: They must read the Dutch-to-English subtitles, watch the actors, and cry all at once.) Sometimes, van Hove notes, “People go out, come back, because it’s too much.” In a way, that, too, protects the experience of the novel - they may not be able to experience the bruisedness to the extent of Jude or even Nasr, but they are experiencing a punishment of their own. What van Hove and his translator, Koen Tachelet, have preserved is the novel’s punishing nature. I tried to bring that back as much as I could, but my influence is limited because I’m just an actor.” “But you don’t have all the backdrop, the little dinners they have, the little jokes they make. The adaptation is “very geared towards Jude, which is logical,” Maarten Heijmans, who plays Willem, says. In this streamlining, the impulse was to hit the “big events” - the deaths, the suicide attempts, the sacrifices - resulting in less sitting in on the friendship of the novel’s four main characters, Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. “Otherwise, it becomes too much, and then it becomes only about that.” Jude, who van Hove estimates cuts himself “20 times or something” in the novel, does so three or four times here. The production may be four hours long, but that still required the first 80 pages of the book to be turned into just ten minutes of performance. ![]() “In the theater, of course, there’s the beginning, middle, and an end,” says van Hove. Onstage, these details must give way to something more recognizably plotlike. ![]() “But because you know all this, because you are being confronted with all this information about how they walk - all this extra information - in the end, when you close the book, you have the feeling that this is a living character, that it’s not fiction. “She writes it so elaborately - how they eat, what they do, to which music they listen, where they are - that at some point you would think, Well, you could condense that a little bit,” Nasr says. Intense, overwhelming sadness occurs in the same tone as great love and mediocre pho. Small aspects of life and lifestyle compound upon one another: Food, art, and scenery are described but not judged. Yet that damage is just one part of A Little Life, a book marked not only by its agony but by its detail. “We’re talking about people who cut themselves, people who have depressions, people who are in abusive relationships, and people who commit suicide or do attempt,” he says. Nasr portrays Jude as someone who is as much a wound as he is a person, as much a literary victim as Tess of the d’Urbervilles or the biblical Job, a man so cloaked in pain that his continued existence is itself shocking. Like the book, it’s not an easy experience. This adaptation, directed by Ivo van Hove, premiered in Amsterdam four years ago and is only now coming to the city where its action takes place via the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Francis, the story’s protagonist, whom he’s been playing since 2018. The race is a four-hour adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, and the hell is the emotional landscape of Jude St. ![]() But they hadn’t.“I call it the marathon into hell,” says Ramsey Nasr. Jude should have wound up-where? In prison, or in a hospital, or dead, or worse. But then again, he would think, what about his life-and about Jude’s life, too-wasn’t it a miracle? He should have stayed in Wyoming, he should have been a ranch hand himself. “You’re dreaming of miracles, Willem,” Idriss would say if he knew what he was thinking, and he knew he was. ![]()
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