Critics are weighing in on A Little Life, the Dutch-language stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s Kirkus Prize–winning 2015 novel that had its American premiere last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The four-hour play, directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, debuted in Amsterdam in 2018; the version playing in Brooklyn has English-language supertitles. Critics agreed that the play preserves the novel’s themes of severe emotional trauma.
Naveen Kumar of the New York Times noted that around a third of the audience walked out of the play by the time intermission was over. “Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense,” Kumar wrote. “But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling?”
Helen Shaw, reviewing the play for the New Yorker, was critical of the play’s ending, writing, “a production that has been trying to balance its sadistic intensities tips, fatally and finally, into silliness.…Great theatre can be punishing, it can be cruel, it can even deliberately inflict harm. But glibness and bathos? Those hurt.”
At the Daily Beast, Tim Teeman called the play “a theatrical endurance test” that “keeps upping its own ante of viciousness and violence.”
But, he wrote, “this critic found A Little Life mesmerizing in a—oops, spoiler—car crash kind of a way. The show is so luridly laser-focused, we are rubbernecking a human being broken to pieces….There is nothing like A Little Life on the New York stage; nothing that looks like it, nothing that ranges so wildly as it does; nothing as challenging, nothing as ferociously committed to its vision.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
