‘It’s Intense’: Ivo van Hove and Jan Versweyveld on Bringing ‘A Little Life’ to BAM

It’s disorienting to realize that Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel A Little Life came out more than seven years ago, given the ironclad grip it’s maintained on the culture. A 750-page epic of pain, friendship, shifting queerness, exploitation, and shame following the lives of four college friends, its operatic highs and lows have inspired constant discourse, fueled as much by praise for its stunning prose and scope as by condemnation of its graphic descriptions of childhood sexual abuse and self-harm. The Atlantic called it “the great gay novel”; The New York Review of Books deemed it “a striptease” in a derogatory way.

Love it or hate it, the 2015 tome left an immediate, indelible mark. “Not a contemporary classic [but] an instant classic,” as stage director Ivo van Hove points out. “It never was a new novel. It became, instantly, like a mythical figure, which is strange when you think about it. It talks about gruesome things—the structural violence and sexual abuse of a seven-year-old boy until he is 50 years old and the brutal, lifelong consequences of that trauma. How can that attract so many people?”

Known in the US for his confrontational Broadway adaptations of landmarks like The Crucible, West Side Story, and Network, the Dutch theater maker has now brought his take on Yanagihara’s novel to BAM for a limited run. First staged in 2018 with his Toneelgroep Amsterdam company in the Netherlands before a brief stint in Edinburgh, the production, which runs just over four hours, had a number of hurdles to jump before coming together. The first one: getting van Hove and his husband and longtime collaborator, production designer Jan Versweyveld, to believe the hype.

“I thought, Well, another gay story…why?’” van Hove quips. “I didn’t care for it.” But after enough friends convinced him to read it, his opinion changed overnight, as did Versweyveld’s, who wondered how its story, which spans decades and continents, could possibly be translated to the minimalist, live aesthetic for which they’re now known.

“The book gets into your skin, and what I did know was that a central piece in the scenography should be something that relates to Jude as a character,” Versweyveld says, zoning in on the book’s main character and the bearer of much of its trauma. “In a very early stage, we decided that the central part of the stage would be skin—a big piece of human-colored skin that conveys [Jude’s] vulnerability.”