A Little Life NYC Reviews and Tickets
About the Show
Production Covid-19 Safety ProtocolsMember Reviews (14)
See it if you read the book and/or if you are moved by powerful painful stories. Fantastic performances and brilliant staging.
Don't see it if You can't stomach 4 hours of subtitles. It's a lot. This play needs to be done in English.
See it if Really exceptional performances. Story is gripping, emotional, and heavy. Very well done!
Don't see it if You aren't up for a 4 hour play in a foreign language. I wish it had been in English, but I still really enjoyed it.
See it if you're a fan of the book or director, willing to sit 4+ hours for a harrowing study of damaged man & his circle of friends, stunning acting
Don't see it if 4+ hours is too daunting, have no stomach for acts of abuse & self-harm depicted on stage, don't like supertitles or relentless grief
See it if Great staging. Definitely doesn't shy from showing difficult subjects: cutting 3x, burning, rape, childhood sexual abuse, sexual trauma, etc
Don't see it if Trauma after trauma after trauma, becomes too much/unbelievable in a play format — folks seem to love the book (stretches traumas more out). Read more
See it if fan of Iva van Hove. Like alternate staging.
Don't see it if want characters one cares about. story that is NOT repetitive. direction is just awful. acting styles are too.
See it if you're into hard core theater experiences that blend moments of extreme violence with sublime tenderness, dealing with troubled pained lives
Don't see it if you find it hard to endure over 4 hours of very graphic sexual abuse and self-inflicted body mutilation, all spoken in Dutch with subtitles.
See it if Ivo Van hove delivered in this devastating tale by Hanya Yanagihara. In Dutch, still Ramsey Nasr will break your heart. Must see.
Don't see it if long plays 4 hours and in Dutch will keep you from seeing a heavy, emotional and devastating play.
See it if You are a huge fan of the book and just have to see it staged
Don't see it if You have a short attention span or require a connection to the characters before seeing them suffer.
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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