A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara's brutal 2015 bestseller A Little Life traces four college friends over the course of more than three decades. This stage adaptation, conceived by the prolific expressionist superdirector Ivo van Hove (West Side Story) for his company Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, is somewhat shorter—but be prepared to strap in for at least four hours of trauma in multimedia detail. The adaptation is by Koen Tachele, from a translation by Kitty Pouwels and Josephine Ruitenberg; performances are in Dutch with English subtitles.