A lot has changed in the world since 1967, when 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen checked into a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. Mental health issues were more stigmatized and less well understood — and many women had yet to secure full agency for all aspects of their lives. Girl, Interrupted, an absorbing play with music based on Kaysen’s bestselling 1993 memoir, plunges us into that bygone era with a clear-eyed attention to detail and a literary bent that shines through the script by Martyna Majok (Cost of Living) and the score by Aimee Mann.
The show hews closer to the episodic, nonlinear nature of Kaysen’s memoir than to the 1999 film adaptation, which starred Winona Ryder as Susanna and turned the sometimes-catatonic sociopath Lisa of the book into a camera-ready, live-wire teenage rebel who pushes other characters to act out (a role so showy that Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for it). Bad things still happen to the young women we meet in the corridors of Boston’s McLean Hospital — but they’re triggered by the women’s own brain chemistry or personal challenges and not the provocations of fellow patients.
Juliana Canfield, who played the Chrtistine McVie doppelganger in Stereophonic, brings a reserved studiousness to the role of Susanna, a natural observer and aspiring writer who bonds with her roommate over their mutual love of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. In addition to the Plath and Robert Lowell-obsessed Grace (Mia Pak), we meet a handful of other residents who share their experiences and diagnoses that turn group therapy into a kind of campfire singalong (complete with cast members playing guitar and violin). Tori (Gabi Campo) is a nepo baby from Mexico City who escaped her day-to-day with amphetamines; Polly (Sally Shaw) is an outwardly perky girl with a bowl cut whose friendly masks a proclivity toward self-harm; Daisy (Katherine Reis) is a strikingly attractive, hip young woman with bulimic habits and serious daddy issues; and then there’s Lisa (King Princess), a sociopathic extrovert who seems too preoccupied causing trouble to ever contemplate suicide.
Without a conventional plot to drive the story, Majok and Mann shape their show around the rhythms of the treatment process itself — particularly Susana’s conversations with a rare female doctor (Emily Skinner) and a no-nonsense nurse (Ta’Rea Campbell) who urges Susanna to lay aside her literary ambitions and train as a dental technician just so she can win discharge. “I’m sorry to inform you about the world we live in,” Campbell’s Valerie advises. “But you can’t just do whatever you want.” Susanna quickly underscores the key element: “‘As a woman.'” Sadly, neither Skinner nor Campbell get a song of their own. But Manoel Felciano, who plays multiple doctors and male authority figures (and a mean guitar), delivers one of the show’s catchier as well as most enraging tunes — a celebration of misogynistic callousness called “Give Me Fifteen” that describes how quickly he can diagnose a woman’s ailments. (“In the time it takes to walk around the block I can have you scheduled for electroshock,” he sings.)
Mann, who may be best known for the guitar-forward indie rock tunes she wrote for Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 movie Magnolia, has long grappled with mental health issues in her work. And she taps into that experience in songs that evoke feelings of anxiety and melancholy without jolting into the maudlin. “I think we all need to hear our sorrow…structured into sound,” Grace tells Susanna as they bond over artists they like. Mann’s music here has an intensity of focus, and genuinely poetic lyricism (“You’re a balloon and all the world’s a pin”), that deepens our understanding of the characters and their challenges even if it doesn’t always function in traditional musical-theater way. These are tunes — terrifically sung by the entire cast — that explore the architecture of mental health challenges, often in darkly sardonic wit and memorable runs of phrase. Mann is less interested in advancing the plot or even letting a character weigh her options before a big decision.
Girl, Interrupted is not a conventional musical. Despite the subject matter, it’s also not a total downer. Director Jo Bonney embraces its unorthodoxy in her understated staging, with a simple stylized set (by the collective dots) and lighting (by Heather Gilbert). Sarah Lux’s costumes and J. Jared Janas’s hair, wig and makeup design summon the fab look of the late ’60s while still connecting us to women who feel familiar even if circumstances have improved. Under Bonney’s direction, the cast conveys the stark reality of their characters without wallowing in their predicament. They seem as surprised as we are when things don’t turn out, when tragedy strikes, and that brings a deeper layer of authenticity to the story. Girl, Interrupted celebrates the strength in sisterhood, and the power of music and storytelling to find meaning in the darkest episodes of human experience. ★★★★☆
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GIRL, INTERRUPTED
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through July 12 for $129