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      BAM Artistic Director David Binder to Step Down in July

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      Binder, who was a Broadway producer before joining the nonprofit in 2019, plans to return to theater’s commercial sector.David Binder, the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will step down in July, as the venerable institution faces ongoing turnover and the challenge of pandemic-era rebuilding after decades of stability in its leadership team.BAM, which began presenting work in 1861 and describes itself as the nation’s oldest performing arts center, long played a key role in New York’s cultural life, presenting adventurous theater, film, music and dance from artists around the world. But the institution was quieter than some at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and Binder’s departure will follow the 2021 exit of the institution’s president, Katy Clark, and the 2020 death of its board chairman, Adam Max.Binder joined BAM as artistic director in 2019, making his tenure significantly shorter than those of his two predecessors, Joseph V. Melillo, who spent 35 years at the institution, and Harvey Lichtenstein, who led BAM’s artistic work for 32 years.Similarly, on the institution’s executive side, Clark left BAM after five years in the post (keeping an apartment the institution helped her purchase); she had succeeded Karen Brooks Hopkins, who had spent 36 years at the institution, including 16 as president. BAM’s current president is Gina Duncan, who started just last year, after a year in which that position was vacant.Binder, who had been producing Broadway shows as well as arts festivals before joining the institution, said he was leaving voluntarily and is planning to return to commercial producing after leading the nonprofit’s artistic programming through the upheaval of the pandemic as well as the change in the organization’s executive staff.BAM said Binder would continue to consult for the organization until next January as it searches for a new artistic leader. Binder began working with Melillo when his appointment was announced in early 2018.“I feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do there, and I want to get back to making work and producing work,” Binder said in an interview. “I want to keep growing.”Duncan characterized the transition similarly, saying, “David decided to move on, and I appreciate him letting me know now.” She added, “We have a strong team in place, and I have time to do a search and find someone to be my artistic partner.”Binder’s departure comes as many performing arts institutions around the nation are seeing turnover at the top — New York’s theater leaders have tended to hang on longer than most, which is a source of criticism as well as stability, but there is wholesale change unfolding in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.Binder, who is 55, has drawn some buzzy work to BAM, which primarily presents shows developed by other companies.Last year’s pandemic-delayed production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which starred James McAvoy and transferred from London, was both a critical and a popular success, becoming the best-selling show in the history of the BAM Harvey Theater. And this month, BAM was the only institution with two shows on The New York Times’s list of things critics are looking forward to this year: the theater critic Jesse Green wrote about anticipating a production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan in the starring roles, and the dance critic Gia Kourlas wrote hopefully about BAM’s U.S. premiere of Pina Bausch’s “Água,” a piece created two decades ago in Brazil.Binder arrived at BAM saying he wanted to bring in new artists — his first Next Wave festival there, in 2019, featured only artists who had not previously performed there. Over the course of his tenure, Binder said he will have presented more than 50 debuts of artistic companies as well as solo performers.Ticket sales during his time have generally exceeded projections; BAM says it is attracting new audiences, and there have been multiple programming highlights: Simon Stone’s “Medea” adaptation, produced by BAM, starring Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale; a new spring music series, curated last year by Hanif Abdurraqib and this year by Solange; and an annual artist residency program.“Through the pandemic and through the leadership changes, I feel that the team and I at BAM have stayed focused on putting fantastic work on our stages, and when we couldn’t do it on our stages, we did it outdoors or site-specific or virtually. And the work we’ve done has been really successful,” he said. “We always tried to mix it up: We had the National Theater of Korea’s opera of ‘Trojan Women,’ and ‘Kiki and Herb Sleigh’; we had the Lithuanian opera ‘Sun & Sea,’ which won the Golden Lion at Venice; and we also hosted the world premiere of Madonna’s ‘Madame X’ tour.”In the commercial arena, Binder is best known as the lead producer of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival in 2014. Binder said that he would soon announce that “Hedwig” was “finally coming to the West End in a big way.”Beyond “Hedwig,” Binder is among a handful of commercial producers who have continued to focus on the production of plays, which tend to be riskier than musicals. He says he plans to resume work on his longtime effort to bring the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “An Enemy of the People” to Broadway. (Last fall, Binder brought Ostermeier’s “Hamlet” to BAM; that production was in German, but “An Enemy of the People” would be presented in English.)Binder said he was also working with the innovative British director Jamie Lloyd, who helmed the “Cyrano” revival at BAM, to develop a new play that he was not yet ready to describe.BAM, like other arts organizations, shrank during the height of the pandemic, but is now nearly back to where it was, according to a spokeswoman: Its current annual budget is $56 million, up from $55 million prepandemic; it has 222 full-time staff positions, down from 256; its most recent Next Wave festival had 13 shows, down from 16 prepandemic; and last spring, BAM presented 17 shows, up from 16 during the final prepandemic spring.“I think we’re doing as well as one can, given the circumstances of the world,” Duncan said. “We’ve had some success in audience growth, and our membership numbers are starting to increase again. Everything is heading in the right direction, and now it’s a matter of time.” More

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      Review: ‘Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era’ Stages a Disaster in Reverse

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      The Under the Radar festival kicks off with an allegory about climate destruction by the Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed.Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A woman. A man. A tree. An apple. So begins “Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era,” a performance piece by the Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in association with the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival. In the show’s first minutes, an apple is plucked and eaten, a paradise destroyed. Then the story changes.For nearly three decades, this collective (its name is a Flemish pun that translates loosely to “feel estate”) has goaded theatergoers, sometimes gently and sometimes (“The Smile Off Your Face,” “A Game of You”) less gently. “Are We Not Drawn,” directed by Alexander Devriendt, falls on the milder end of that spectrum, even as it functions as an allegory about climate destruction.After the apple is devoured, the tree that held it is torn apart by one of the six actors. Not everything in the show is entirely real; the tree very much is. On opening night on Wednesday at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, audience members groaned as he ripped branch after branch. If I’m honest I groaned, too — that poor defenseless sapling — even though there’s currently a Christmas tree in the corner of my apartment slowly turning into tinder. Soon a rainbow of plastic grocery bags, the kind that have recently been outlawed in New York, litters the stage. (OK, fine, I have a few of those in my apartment, too.) Then the smoke begins to billow.This first half-hour, which ends with the stage strewn with trash and filled with smoke is ugly, deliberately, and just a little unintelligible. There’s sparse dialogue throughout, rendered without supertitles. The non-Belgians in the theater will probably assume that it is Flemish. (I did.) It is not. This is one more show in which the troupe toys with its audience, though here it displays better than usual sportsmanship. To say more would ruin the show’s central surprise. But remember that its title is a palindrome, a type of wordplay in which a word or phrase reads the same backward and forward. So after advancing, the show must then reverse. “Are we not drawn” is a parable of disaster, but run the tape backward and it instead promises repair. Paradise, it suggests, can be regained.But if the ideas are wobbly, the craftsmanship is astonishingly sturdy. The ensemble works with incredible precision, selling gestures and movements that might otherwise seem bizarre or arbitrary. Nothing here is arbitrary. Each step, each syllable has purpose. And each is set to William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops,” a composition that is designed to deteriorate.Maybe it doesn’t pay to think too hard about the show. Unless you’re a fervent believer in carbon capture and probably even then, the odds that humans can remediate the ecological harm they have done seems slim. The show acknowledges this, winkingly, as brute realism gives way to something closer to magic. (There are a few other winks, too. At one point, sparks fly, literally, courtesy of what looks like a mini circular saw.) I’m ultimately not sure if “Are we not drawn” is hopeful or hopeless, a hymn to human endeavor or futility. Certainly it celebrates what a committed group of artists can achieve. Isn’t that enough?Are We Not Drawn Onward to New EraThrough Sunday at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 75 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      Adrienne Mancia, Influential Film Curator, Dies at 95

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      Her choices for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music gave foreign directors and newcomers valuable exposure in New York.Adrienne Mancia, who scoured the world for significant films and brought them to New York as a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, died on Sunday in Teaneck, N.J. She was 95.Her niece Francine Pozner Ehrenberg confirmed the death, in a care center.Ms. Mancia was instrumental in giving audiences some of their earliest looks at work by Wim Wenders of Germany, Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal and other notable directors, and helped rediscover archival gems and introduce subgenres like European animation and Cinema Novo from Brazil.She joined MoMA in 1964 as the secretary to Richard Griffith, the curator of the museum’s film department. Soon she was given the title of curatorial assistant and began organizing exhibitions; she rose to associate curator and then, in 1977, curator. She held that title until 1998, when she left for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was opening the BAM Rose Cinemas and moving into film programming.Her choices were crucial in expanding the horizons of American cinephiles, particularly in her early decades at MoMA.“As this was before the age of videotape, internet and niche movie channels,” Jon Gartenberg, a curator of MoMA’s film archive for part of her tenure and a longtime friend, said by email, “the recognition for the films that she curated at MoMA garnered an outsized importance in terms of the New York film culture and beyond.”Other museums would take their cues from the programming at MoMA and in the New Directors/New Films series sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Film festivals throughout North America would pick up on Ms. Mancia’s finds, and her vast influence led to awards from foreign governments.“Adrienne Mancia has probably contributed more than any other person to the introduction of Italian cinema in America,” Renato Pachetti, the president of the RAI Corporation, which has financed numerous Italian films, said in 1988 when Ms. Mancia received the Order of the Republic of Italy. Four years earlier, France had given her similar recognition, naming her a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.Ms. Mancia traveled extensively in her search for worthy films, both new and old. The film critic J. Hoberman, who knew her for decades and worked with her as a curator on a 1991 exhibition, “Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds,” said Ms. Mancia had not been content with simply accepting the film packages that other countries would send.“She loved to work in archives,” he said in a phone interview. “She didn’t want them to tell her which films to show. She wanted to pick them out herself.”Her interests were not limited to foreign films, or to the highbrow end of the cinematic spectrum.“She was a cinephile,” Mr. Hoberman said, “but she was not a snob.”In 1979 she organized a seemingly un-MoMA-like retrospective of films from American International Pictures, which in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s specialized in low-budget, quickly made movies for the drive-in crowd like “Girls in Prison” (1956) and “Beach Party” (1963). It wasn’t just an exercise in kitsch.“It’s extraordinary to see how many filmmakers, writers and actors — now often referred to as ‘the new Hollywood’ — took their first creative steps at American International,” she said at the time.“Low budgets can force you to find fresh resources,” she continued, adding that there was an “energy to these feisty films that capture a certain very American quality.”In 1985 she presented an exhibition of films featuring Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. cartoon characters. Again, nostalgia wasn’t the point; the artistry represented by predigital film animation was.“This exhibition makes me very happy and very sad,” she told The New York Times. “It makes me happy because I love it and sad because it might very well be the end of a great era, the end of complete animation, done frame by frame with great care, approaching art.”Adrienne Phyllis Johnson was born on June 5, 1927, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father, Harry Johnson, owned a furniture store, and her mother, Fae (Weintraub) Johnson, was a homemaker.She grew up in Paterson, N.J., and graduated from Eastside High School in 1944 after skipping a few grades. She received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin at 20, and later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.Her niece said that she married Umberto Mancia in Italy, where she spent much of the 1950s. The marriage ended in divorce.At MoMA, she helped establish Cineprobe, a program that from 1968 to 2002 presented works by independent and experimental filmmakers and hosted discussions with them. Though many of Ms. Mancia’s exhibitions were more mainstream, she especially enjoyed spotlighting new and little-known works and directors.“To discover people who have new ways of saying things with film is thrilling,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It keeps the idea alive that there are still surprises out there.”Ms. Mancia, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by a sister, Merle Johnson Pozner.Those who worked with her said that filmmakers weren’t the only ones who benefited from Ms. Mancia; she also influenced many younger curators.“For me, Adrienne was a major bridge between creation and curation,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “Early in my career, working at such an august institution as MoMA, Adrienne pulled me aside and reminded me that without filmmakers, none of us would have any jobs. She instilled in me a sense of humbleness that my mission was to support their creativity in my curatorial work.”Upon her death, Ron Magliozzi, a longtime MoMA staff member who is now a curator in the film department, sent an email to colleagues.“If only a little of Adrienne’s unmatched passion for cinema rubbed off on you,” it said, “it was enough to fuel your career.” More

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      Review: Dancing to Tears for Fears, Until They’re Worn Out

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      The Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat presents “LOVETRAIN2020,” a work set to hits by the British duo, for his company’s Brooklyn Academy of Music debut.It’s true that we are living in a very, very mad world, as the Tears for Fears song goes, surrounded by “worn-out places, worn-out faces.” It’s also true enough that the faces of the dancers in Emanuel Gat’s “LOVETRAIN2020,” set to songs by the British duo, are strangely worn away, too. What’s the difference? Their faded, washed-out expressions are not the result of stress and hardship, but by two enduring tricks of the theater: lights and fog.Sometimes a confluence of music and dance is the tonic you didn’t know you needed. When the show began — “Ideas as Opiates” flowing into “The Prisoner” and, a bit later, “Mad World” — what came with it was the sensation of a fresh surprise, a flamboyant dance in the form of an encouraging pick-me-up. Sadly, that feeling didn’t last long. Gat’s train started to stutter midway through, and by the end, even the dancers’ joyful twirls and smiles couldn’t disguise that it had conked out.For its Brooklyn Academy of Music debut on Thursday, Emanuel Gat Dance made for a striking sight initially as its 14 members, draped in Thomas Bradley’s textural costumes — voluminous and elegant, shape-shifting and fantastical — slowly took over the stage. They created a glittering community, a world in which it seemed like the past was facing its future.The stage, too, glowing in a chiaroscuro treatment of light and shadows, had a way of transporting the landscape into a painting, just as it transformed the dancers, dripping in fabric, from two-dimensional silhouettes — they entered from the back of a hazy stage through narrow panels and stood with their backs to us — into moving sculptures. Their skin was luminous, their taut muscles sinewy.Often, there was push and pull between the rhythm of the music and pace of the dancing; sometimes Gat rejected the beat, and in other moments, embraced it. In one scene, a soloist contorted his body ever-so-slowly at the front of the stage, while a row of dancers were planted behind him, shifting from side to side in a basic step touch while arranging their arms in unison positions: up in the air, one elbow bent, one hand behind the head. It had a certain groove.But gradually it became clear that there was little beneath the ornate mood-board appeal of “LOVETRAIN” to warrant its length. The dancers’ physicality was arresting as they torqued their backs and torsos, melting onto the floor and swooping back up again with a feverish vivacity. Yet as Gat’s groupings persisted — a trio here, a more concentrated cluster there, a lone dancer running into the center of it all to deliver a little wiggle — the repetitiveness of their high kicks, raveling and unraveling arms and speedy, purposeful walks on and off the stage started to blur together.The dusky lighting, so startling at first, became increasingly murky. And Gat’s frequent silent sections — initially giving the setting a kind of haunting, heartbreaking poignancy — turned ponderous. In those quiet moments, I yearned for another Tears for Fears song until I realized just how repetitive “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is. Don’t even get me started on “Shout.” Was this a missed opportunity, or is Tears for Fears music for the elliptical?But why did this dance happen in the first place? Gat, an Israeli choreographer who formed his company in Tel Aviv — it is now based in France — created it during the darker moments of the pandemic, when audiences needed a release. The world was crying. His musical choice made sense: Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, of Tears for Fears, met in Bath, England, when they were 13 and living in single-parent homes, according to a program note. They named their band after the concept of primal therapy, which focuses, in part, on repressed emotions from childhood: Tears are a replacement for fears.As the show progresses, emotions build through the songs’ lyrics and the dancers’ silky, sinuous power, but Gat’s choreographic frame is too tenuous. Dancers, full of finesse and drive but little urgency, travel up and down the same diagonal; they gesture toward the audience with outstretched, beckoning hands. They rarely seem to be dancing on a precipice.Doesn’t surviving — and dancing through a pandemic — take courage? “LOVETRAIN” is neither daring nor especially passionate. It’s a look. The lighting, by Gat with technical direction and supervision by Guillaume Février, is the show, and the choreography, trapped in a haze of lights and fabric, never rises above it.Emanuel Gat DanceThrough Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org More

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      ‘Hamlet’ Review: A Dirt-Eating Danish Prince, Born to Be Wild

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      Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet,” presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, unleashes more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered.“Hamlet” is a work of excesses: an endlessly philosophizing hero, a play within a play and enough casualties that by the end the stage looks like a horror film, scattered with corpses.And yet it is still possible to out-“Hamlet” “Hamlet,” to create a production with even more spilled blood, more graveyard dirt and more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered. For better or for worse, this is Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet” for the Schaubühne Berlin, presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival: the Danish prince unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.At the start of the production, running in BAM’s Harvey Theater through Nov. 5, a few figures gather, Last Supper-style, at a long table with a white tablecloth. Their expressions are unclear: They’re not only behind a curtain, but also sitting far from us, upstage. Downstage is a plot of dirt, where a coffin is being lowered into the earth. They’re at a wedding table for Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet (an unpredictable Lars Eidinger), crouched in a corner, begins his “to be or not to be” speech (yes, a whole two acts early), speaking into a camera he holds close to his face, which is projected large onto the curtain for us to see. (The video design is by Sébastien Dupouey.) A gravedigger fights a coffin — the coffin of the late King Hamlet, who died under mysterious circumstances — into the ground in a long sequence of daffy physical comedy set to a swelling barrage of percussion, strings and guitar. Gertrude, in a white cropped shirt and white slacks, wears a long white veil and belly dances seductively for her brother-in-law-turned-husband.In other words, the performance has begun.Thomas Bading as Claudius and Jenny König as Gertrude kissing at their wedding table, with Eidinger’s Hamlet capturing the moment, which is projected onto a curtain.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis German-language production with supertitles (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg) was first staged in 2008 and has toured internationally since then. It takes a Brechtian approach, self-consciously nodding to the performance as a performance. In that way it’s not unlike, say, James Ijames’s thrilling “Fat Ham,” which ran at the Public Theater this spring — shows that push back against both the text and the fourth wall.This “Hamlet,” however, has neither the same poetry nor grace, which isn’t to say it’s unsuccessful. The production exhibits cleverness in its puckishly untamed and untidy circus act, but tips over into excess as it tries to make its spectacle of spit, dirt and trash into a masticated art piece with Shakespeare’s great work as its fodder.The cast of characters is condensed; a six-person ensemble plays 11 parts (everyone except Eidinger takes on two roles). The pairings are cleverly thought through: It makes sense that the actors who play Horatio (Damir Avdic), Hamlet’s closest confidante, and Laertes (Konrad Singer), Hamlet’s peer, also play the prince’s treacherous friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, offering opposing views of what Hamlet’s relationships look like. Claudius (Thomas Bading, on this evening) crumbles in a heap on his wedding table, in a drunken stupor, but then rises, as if from the sleep of death, as the late king’s ghost.Robert Beyer takes on two fools: Osric and Polonius. (He delivers an especially fine performance of the inane royal adviser Polonius, not as the clown productions often make him to be, but as a more realistic yet still comical daft uncle who isn’t as wise as he lets on.) Jenny König is left with the play’s troubled women — Queen Gertrude and the ill-fated Ophelia — though they are at least as ill-served in this production as in so many others. The fact that they are conflated here wisely calls to Hamlet’s psychosexual fixation on his mother’s eroticism and Ophelia’s innocence. But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.In the middle of a flurry of action, like a force of nature, is Eidinger, who retches, eats dirt, face-plants into the ground, tumbles, break-dances, twitches, hoots, spasms, shrieks, cross-dresses and wanders into the audience as he pleases. He throws empty drink cans, kicks around plates and flatware, sprays a hose of water across the stage (audience members in the first few rows, beware the splash zone), takes breaks to drop contemporary music references and pop culture jokes in English and to D.J. Though this production relentlessly trims down the text, it’s bloated back up with improv that steers the show to a nearly three-hour running time.König and Robert Beyer as Polonius in the play, which is presented in German and features a muddy graveyard increasingly littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what we get is a show stripped of its pathos; Eidinger’s performance is as vibrant as it is off-putting and as aloof and performative as it is fascinating. This “Hamlet” is no longer a classical Greek-style tragedy of vengeance, mortality and fate but rather a tragedy of a man undone by his own solipsism.In “Hamlet” we see a production that sometimes succumbs to one of the frequent pitfalls of experimental takes on classic works: It feels more attuned to inherited ideas about and traditions of the play as opposed to being attuned to the material itself.Ostermeier’s direction is confrontational, from Eidinger’s interactions with the audience to the occasionally piercing, cinematic music (Nils Ostendorf). The lighting design, by Erich Schneider, takes us from horror to comedy, and occasionally targets the audience when Ostermeier starts to lean against the fourth wall. A nimbly choreographed fencing match (choreography by René Lay) so convincingly recalls the casually deadly jabs you’d see from two boxers in a street fight.One of my many favorite lines in the play is when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees his country as a prison. Rosencrantz challenges him, suggesting that he is trapped in his own mind. Hamlet replies, “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” In Ostermeier and Eidinger’s “Hamlet,” the characters, setting and details become less important; the whole world we have is the chaotic space between Hamlet’s ears. Though being trapped in Prince Hamlet’s mind offers us a new perspective that some will find freeing, others will see only bedlam and madness.HamletThrough Nov. 5 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      ‘A Little Life’ Review: A Collage of Unrelenting Torment

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      Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel comes to the BAM stage, and raises the question: How much suffering can the protagonist (and the audience) endure?Pain is something most characters try to outrun — or that results, with some logic, from their actions. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.”Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. (Yanagihara is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.A character study that descends into misery on the page is an aesthetic experience suited to the form — you can put down a book whenever you want. But there are only so many times you can look away over the course of a four-hour show. A degree of remove, at least, is provided for those who don’t speak Dutch. (This production, which originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director, is performed with English supertitles.)Yanagihara’s immersion into the lives and minds of her characters (nearly all of them men) gets reordered and distilled here into abbreviated art openings, dinner parties and strobe-lit nights on the town. Slow-motion tracking shots of eerily empty Manhattan streets appear at either side of a sprawling crimson rug, visual cues for context and dread (van Hove’s longtime partner and collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the set, lighting and video). Everyday furnishings (a bathroom sink, a working kitchen, an artist’s studio) are placed in contrast with the grandeur of the space (several rows of onstage seating trick the eye into a sense of intimacy).From left: Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Nasr and Edwin Jonker in the play, which originated at International Theater Amsterdam in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe men address their thoughts and circumstances to the audience and to one another, in a collage of reflections and exposition. There’s JB (Majd Mardo), the saucy and promising artist for whom Jude is a favorite portrait subject and sometime object of resentment; Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), minimally sketched as the architect who designs all of Jude’s dwellings; and Willem (Maarten Heijmans), whose friendship with Jude consumes much of the novel and suffers the most here from being rendered in shorthand, particularly when their relationship takes an unbelievable turn toward romance.And, of course, there’s Jude (Ramsey Nasr), a magician whose “sole trick is concealment,” according to his doctor (Bart Slegers). Jude is stubbornly elusive even throughout the novel’s 720 pages, less of a character than an amalgam of scars and cipher for the attention of others. Onstage, that disappearing act presents a conundrum. It is grueling to watch Jude use a razor to slice open his forearms a second, and then a third time, blood soaking his clothes. By the play’s third hour he looks like a walking murder scene. Flashbacks to the sexual abuse he experienced as a child, at the hands of a priest and then a doctor, and by a lover in the present (all played by Hans Kesting), are harrowing and unflinching, even as van Hove’s staging is sensitive and not overly explicit.Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense. But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling? (You might ask roughly a third of the audience members, who walked out by the end of intermission.) Of course, we instinctively recoil at the harm enacted on Jude; it is inhumane in the purest sense — no one should ever have to endure it. But these scenes might actually feel emotionally wrenching, too, were his character more than the sum of his grisly mistreatment.Whittle the story down to its major incidents, and what’s left is a series of escalating debasements until Jude all but disintegrates. This plays out onstage with a level of luridness. More time and attention are paid to Jude’s suffering than to anything else, including the relationships that we are presumably meant to invest in, and that might have been used to reveal more about Jude. It’s a problem in the book as well, but becomes rather stark onstage, as when Willem insists on beginning a sexual relationship with Jude that feels unearned and like another form of punishment.Nasr plays Jude’s agony and frustration to operatic heights, with the bracing screams and the running in circles of a man who wants nothing more than to escape his own body. It’s a marathon performance that manages to lend human form to what is essentially a pileup of impossible burdens. Of the four friends, Mardo’s JB makes the liveliest case for a person with interests other than Jude, a rare glimpse at a world beyond Jude’s quicksand orbit.But if there is an obvious conduit for empathy, it’s Harold (Jacob Derwig), Jude’s mentor and eventual adoptive father. Because a parent’s love is meant to be unconditional, the concern he expresses for Jude with moving insight makes the most sense of anyone’s. (No one talks about the tiny bit of relief that a parent feels, he says, when their worst fears are realized.) Ana (Marieke Heebink), the social worker who rehabilitated Jude as a teenager, pops up as a persistent voice in his mind and an unexpected narrative compass. She is the play’s sole key to forward momentum, encouraging Jude to reveal himself by way of the terrors he’s experienced.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. After all that Jude has endured, how bad could death be?A Little LifeThrough Oct. 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours 10 minutes. More