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.

A little life by hanya yanagihara