The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.” The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Ĭonceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. Pain is something most characters try to outrun - or that results, with some logic, from their actions.
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