Theater: “A Little Life” @ BAM

Hana Yanigahara must get paid by the word. I got through “In Paradise”, her recent 717-page magnum-opus-tedious, by the skin of my teeth. And now her 2015 novel, “A Little Life” has been adapted into a four-hour play at BAM.

While my daily bike rides last four hours, at least they’re pleasant. “A Little Life,” which chronicles the life of Jude St. Francis (Ramsey Nasr), a brilliant and masochistic gay lawyer in NYC, is an unpleasant endurance test.

Jude and his three adoring ex-Ivy college mates  live their best New York lives as lawyer, painter, actor, and architect. On a stage designed to resemble a SoHo loft, they prepare puff pastries (gougeres!), enjoy strobe-lit nights on the town, and have artsy conversations. “I’m not Black, I’m post-Black,” JB (Majd Mardo), the painter says. Seriously?

Jude’s friends don’t know anything about his past or that he is in the habit of cutting himself with razors. And he doesn’t just talk about it, he actually does it on stage, three times. The blood runs everywhere, including all over the stage floor and onto Jude’s white shirt which he wears for most of the evening.

The reason for this cutting ritual? Jude was introduced to it at the age of 9, when a priest sexually abused him at a monastery where he was staying. The priest, Brother Luke (Hans Kesting) then pimps him out to fellow pedophiles, explaining that “by bleeding yourself, you are getting rid of the sin.” Oh Brother.

What follows are equally sadistic scenes from Jude’s young adulthood, one in which he develops a relationship with a man (also played by Kesting) that quickly turns violent.  Mentally battered and physically bruised, Jude is approached by his friends but spurns their support. The play spirals further downward from there.

Apropos of nothing, “A Little Life”, which premiered at Amsterdam’s International Theater, is performed in Dutch. (Exhale, theatergoers, there are English supertitles.) There’s also a string quartet playing Mahler in front of the stage to telegraph that you are watching a Very Important Play.

The brightest spot in this “unrelenting torment”(NYT) is the performance of Ramsey Nasr, who portrays the suffering of Jude as kind of a gay Jesus Christ. Marieke Heebink, the sole woman in the cast, has her moments as his caseworker, as does Harold (Jacob Derwig), his law professor and kindly mentor who adopts Jude when he turns 30. Props to Ivo von Hove, who directs this borring claptrap with the taste and sensitivity it doesn’t deserve.

Bottom line: an intelligent adaptation of an overwrought and overwritten story that’s inexplicably loved by many. I suspect “Hana-philes” would like the play more than I did. A lot more.