Girl, Interrupted may seem like unlikely material for a musical. Based on a 1993 bestselling memoir by Susanna Kaysen, the slim volume chronicles the author’s approximately two-year stay inside a psychiatric facility in the late 1960s. After a decade of effort, the book’s adaptation is finally premiering off Broadway at New York’s Public Theater with a cast that includes Juliana Canfield, the Tony-nominated Stereophonic actor, as Susanna and the pop star King Princess, in her stage debut, as Lisa.
Though the theatrical interpretation pulls solely from the memoir, James Mangold’s 1999 film adaptation, starring Winona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie in an Oscar-winning performance as Lisa, will probably loom large in the audience’s minds, as it did for the cast.
“I was a very type-A teen and it was thrilling to watch other teenagers behave in ways that felt so distant from how I thought I was allowed to behave,” says Canfield. “The movie felt like permission to accept that I was struggling with things; it was cathartic for me.”
The show’s origins began with Angelica Zollo, one of the show’s producers, who had discovered Girl, Interrupted as a teenager. She was among the many readers who saw themselves in the characters’ struggles; the book became a national bestseller and introduced a boom of memoirs about young women and mental illness. Zollo later brought the idea of adaptation to her parents, both producers; her mother, Barbara Broccoli, controlled the James Bond franchise for decades. For the music, Zollo envisioned Aimee Mann, whose dark-witted and devastating songwriting had landed her an Oscar nomination for her work on the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. After the pandemic postponed the production, Mann released her songs written for the musical as the 2021 album Queens of the Summer Hotel. (Though Mann’s music is in the production, she is no longer actively involved.)
In 2017, the production team approached Martyna Majok, the playwright, after seeing her Pulitzer prize-winning drama Cost of Living. (Girl, Interrupted reunites Majok with Jo Bonney, the director.) Majok had seen the film “many, many years ago” but had not yet read the book. “I fell for Susanna’s voice, her wit, clear-eyed perspective, and her beautiful heartache,” she says. “[Kaysen] collected these extraordinary characters that lived so loudly on the page.”
Girl, Interrupted the book is structured nonlinearly as Kaysen reflects on her younger self with time’s emotional distance. She adds perspective and contrast to her own account by including scans of medical records. These stylistic choices presented some challenges. Kaysen “wrote in such little detail. It’s potent, but there’s not much of it,” says Majok. “We had to figure out how to create a dramatic propulsive piece of theater while honoring the fragmentary nature of memory and what makes the memoir itself so special.” Kaysen is not involved in the production, but has given her blessing. “She really wanted us to make it our own,” says Majok.
Majok chose to frame the production as a memory play that toggles between the perspectives of older and younger Susanna. The stark set captures the minimalism of an institutional setting as well as an intangible past. There is a circular platform which brings to mind a nurse’s station that can be lifted or lowered into a scene and there are leveled platforms upstage. The few props include chairs, cots and a piano. “It became this dance of tension between them and what they have to teach each other,” Majok says. “The 38-year-old Susanna is questing for something to help move her life forward. There’s something unresolved in her present that necessitates that she goes back in time.” As revealed in the memoir, Kaysen learned of her diagnosis of borderline personality disorder 25 years after she was discharged.
When 18-year-old Kaysen checks herself into McLean after a suicide attempt, “she’s very scared and in denial that she needs help”, says Canfield. “Over the course of the play, she finds friendship and camaraderie with these other young women who are struggling.” Canfield spends the entire show onstage and the material frequently requires her to quickly transition from a moment of emotional duress to one of calm, anthropological reflection. “Older Susanna is a reprieve from the difficult mental space that the younger Susanna often finds herself in,” she says. “It’s this little pressure relief valve. I go to a place that feels quite dark or dangerous, and then the play asks me to step out of it for a moment.”
The adaptation focuses on five female patients: Tori, an amphetamine addict from Mexico; Daisy, OCD and likely sexually abused; Polly, a sweet burn victim with schizophrenia; and Grace, Susanna’s roommate who is a composite of two characters in the memoir. And then there’s Lisa, a mischievous sociopath with “a sense of sexuality that transcends gender”, according to King Princess, who watched videos of jaguars and Marc Bolan, a glam rocker, to develop her physicality. “She’s kind of a predator, she slinks around, very hip-forward, pussy-forward.” A shapeshifting “male presence” and three female McLean staffers round out the cast.
The show’s elegant folk music emerges organically as the girls attend therapy and have late-night chit-chat about real-life McLean patients such as poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Several cast members play instruments live, and the actors largely remain onstage, harmonizing together as a chorus. The choreography by Sonya Tayeh, a Tony winner, is similarly understated and involves a revolving stage. Though the subject matter is heavy – suicide, electroconvulsive therapy and mental illness among them – there are moments of delightful levity, like a scene where Lisa throws a birthday party for the catatonics. Two hours without an intermission fly by, though the cast is so wonderful that audiences may want them to stick around longer.
King Princess recalls an illicitness when they watched the movie as a young teenager. “I felt like I was watching something in secret,” King Princess says. “For me, it was a queer film because of the kiss. [With] Angie and Winona’s relationship, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a gay movie,’ and I related to it. All the girls were in there for varying degrees of shit that’s pretty normal.” The adaptation features its own queer moment, though the context is dramatically different from the film’s moment of liberation between patients.
Though conversations around mental health have evolved significantly since the book’s events and publication, the material still resonates today. “I think it’s probably more relevant than it was 10 years ago because of the oppressive verbiage around non-male people in this world, and what we are or are not allowed to do,” says King Princess. “A lot of our government officials have the same point of view as male doctors in the 60s, they sound straight out of our script!”
King Princess also mentions the similarities between the girls’ horror watching coverage of the Vietnam war and violent police intervention at protests to today’s news cycles. “You swap out the single-channel TV in the common room for our phones, and it’s the same,” she says, “It’s a story about finding community in a really bizarre place, and that’s what we’re dealing with now, in a really dark chapter of history.”
Ultimately, the narrative of a young person finding their place in the world remains relatable and meaningful. “It’s always difficult to navigate being a teenager, no matter the time period you’re in. There’s so many questions, and it feels like so few answers,” Canfield says. “Girl, Interrupted is an evergreen reminder that you are not alone in that struggle.”
Girl, Interrupted is at Public Theater, New York City, until 12 July
