There are some ingenious ideas in play in actress-writer Maia Novi’s 80-minute autobiographical tour de force Invasive Species, which opened Wednesday at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theatre after a successful run last summer at the Off Off Broadway space The Tank. And the emphasis is very much on play. Because Novi and director-developer Michael Breslin take a deliberately absurdist approach to her journey as an Argentine immigrant in the United States, an aspiring actress in a cut-throat industry, and as a psychiatric patient suffering from an unnamed condition that lands her involuntarily in a hospital.
Early on in the show, Novi’s Hollywood-movie-loving alter ego is bitten by a literal Acting Bug (Julian Sanchez, in an insect mask), who explains his life’s purpose to “feed on talent” and “look for children who want attention but don’t get it.” Soon, he is not only manhandling Novi, groping her on stage, but also literally spitting in her face — an action that elicited shocked snorts of laughter from the audience. (Curiously, this very of-the-moment production does not mention an intimacy coordinator, though Beth Gill is credited with “movement direction.”) The scene is outrageous, on several levels, but it also plants a false expectation for the sort of physical trauma that our heroine might have to endure as the play unfolds.
As playwright and performer, Novi is at her best sending up her dual challenges as an actor in training and as a South American immigrant. On the one hand, she is prized for her otherness, which helps land her a spot at Yale Drama School (where Breslin and many of her four other castmates were trained, along with executive producer Jeremy O. Harris). But no sooner does she secure a pathway to industry success than she is asked to conform to more conventional standards, particularly in the way she speaks. (Hilariously, she’s soon mainlining Gwyneth Paltrow audio in an effort to shake her native accent.) The absurdity of her dilemma is heightened by her pursuit of a dream role — that of Eva Peron, another aspiring actress — in a production led by a clueless white director (Sanchez again) who insists that his Buenos Aires native is not Argentine enough.
The production has a good deal of fun with the hypocrisy and superficiality of the media and acting-school worlds, including a glib Hollywood agent (Raffi Donatich) hilariously described in the script as “if vocal fry had a face.” It also captures the universal anxieties of young creative types and the pressures of making your mark in a competitive field — or of preparing for a make-or-break pre-MFA showcase that you’re told has launched many a successful career. (You can imagine some of the actorly monologues here in future drama-school showcases.)
None of this is particularly new, but Invasive Species benefits from Novi’s winsome performance, Breslin’s disciplined direction, and the unusual meta structure that shifts suddenly between heightened satire and more serious, contemplative scenes. (Yichen Zhou’s lighting design reinforces the disorienting effect with blinking lights that suggest glitches in the matrix of the storytelling.)
What differentiates Novi’s story from that of many a young BIPOC creator, though, is her struggles with mental health that become serious enough to justify her commitment to a hospital, where a psychiatrist (Sam Gonzalez) and other authority figures are just as bewildering as those industry gatekeepers and her fellow patients offer a mix of nominal support and sharp-elbowed distance not unlike her drama-school peers. Her arrival as a patient is first presented as a Kafka-esque nightmare, made worse because she’s a twentysomething woman who’s been placed in an adolescent ward.
The scenes in the psych ward are presented thoughtfully, in a more natural tone, and Maia forges a genuine connection with one patient, Akila (Alexandra Maurice), that eventually builds to a mutual sharing of secrets about their conditions. While we never learn Novi’s actual diagnosis, these revelations recast a lot of our understanding of her predicament, and why her hospital admission followed some alarmingly self-destructive behavior. This was no accident, or an unjust confinement of a wronged woman.
However, there’s something off, both tonally and intellectually, about conflating mental illness with the desire to act (or to succeed as an immigrant). That disconnect is reinforced when Akila offers the advice that, in this play’s telling, all too quickly helps Novi spring herself from the hospital and return to Yale and her career. “All you gotta do is act normal. Pretend. You should be good at that — you’re an actress, right?” she says, adding counsel that extends to how Maia can handle all those clueless white directors and industry figures who stand in her path to stardom. “You gotta give them exactly what they want.”
This is the sort of assimilationist mantra that many an immigrant or arts-world newbie has adopted to not only cope, but get ahead, in a foreign land or an unforgiving industry. And Novi embraces that attitude as Invasive Species builds to a happy ending that is filtered through her journey of hard work and compromise. But the strain to tie up all the thematic threads in a neat bow doesn’t quite work — especially when it comes to handling mental illness. For most patients with serious psychiatric conditions, “Act normal” is no substitute for psychotropic medication and regular therapy. To suggest that a patient can just “fake it till they make it” is not only superficial but dangerous, as if we could just transfer patients directly from Bellevue to Juilliard and produce healthy outcomes.
Still, Invasive Species is an ambitious piece of work and Novi is a mesmerizing figure at the center of her own story, surrounded by a first-rate cast that breathe life into the very performative style of storytelling. The end result may be a bit messy, but so is life.
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