About the Show

Ivo van Hove's adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara's novel, following 4 friends throughout their lives.

Based on Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed novel, this play explores the complex relationships between four hardworking friends—a lawyer, an actor, an architect, and an artist— throughout three decades of their lives.

Jude, an introverted and tortured lawyer, both craves and fears intimacy. Soon, however, he and his friends are faced with the need to surrender, and test the limitations of love.

Adapted for the stage by celebrated director Ivo van Hove, this harrowing story portrays the friends' lives from college through the stresses of middle age in New York City.

Note: This show includes strong language, nudity, violence, and content about suicide.

Critic Reviews (4)

"There is an absurdity to the bleakness of 'A Little Life,' a sense that real life only rarely reaches such abominable depths. It’s a mechanism of great tragedy that it offers such cold comfort."
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" 'A Little Life' onstage makes it all the more obvious that this plot is really a Passion Play... It’s a sacrificial story for a time without God."
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"There’s something gruesome and ungainly about 'A Little Life' in any medium; van Hove’s treatment of it as the tragedy it is makes it undeniable, too."
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"As in the book, the extremity and the frequency of the violence does pile up and tumble over through the end of the play, reducing the hours before to a feeling that they were just one fucking thing after another."
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Cast and creative team