In 1967, 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen was admitted to the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, following a suicide attempt. Decades later, she wrote the best-selling memoir Girl, Interrupted, chronicling her approximately two-year stay inside the facility, where she observed and befriended her fellow patients. Then, in 1999, that book became a cult-classic film starring Winona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie as Lisa, a lovable sociopath with microbangs.
Now, Kaysen’s story—a foundational text for generations of misunderstood young women—is being revived for the stage at The Public Theater. With a book by playwright Martyna Majok (Cost of Living), songs by Aimee Mann, and choreography by Sonya Tayeh, this telling of Girl, Interrupted, directed by Jo Bonney, is a memory play, with musical interludes threaded through a largely nonlinear accounting of events. For Bonney, the set functioned “as both the interior of McLean and the interior of Susanna’s mind.”
The movie may now be the most familiar version of the story—and the one the actors knew best going into the project—but the play adapts the memoir, which Majok was enthralled by. “I fell for [Kaysen’s] voice, her dry wit and clear-eyed perspective, her humor and heartache,” she says. “With muscular, economical language, she had collected these extraordinary characters that lived so loudly on the page.”
And those characters are being played by an extraordinary cast, with Juliana Canfield, of Succession and Stereophonic, inhabiting the role of Susanna, opposite King Princess as Lisa. The residents at McLean are rounded out by Valerie (Ta’Rea Campbell), Tori (Gabi Campo), Grace (Mia Pak), Daisy (Katherine Reis), Polly (Sally Shaw), and the ominous Male Presence (Manoel Feliciano).
Canfield recalls seeing the film as a teenager and being taken by Ryder’s performance. “She’s like Audrey Hepburn, but she’s grittier and darker,” she says. “She’s gamine, but also gutsy and emotional.”
Though it’s not exactly a musical, the songs in this play are crucial to the emotional journeys of its characters, charting their pain and insecurities. The girls of McLean are all part of the chorus; in one haunting song, they harmonize to ask: “What’s to become of me?”
“This play goes to really dark, underexplored caverns of the human mind and heart,” Canfield says. “And I think music is a way to go to those places.”
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
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