A thin membrane separates the realms of the sane and the insane, and a person may discover they’ve crossed it almost by accident. In its strongest moments, the “play with music” adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted captures the riptide sensation of being pulled far from safe shores and unsure of how you got there or how to get back. “People used to ask me how I’d ended up in a mental institution,” Susanna, played by Juliana Canfield, tells the audience in its opening scene. “It’s easy. You just — slip. Into a parallel universe.” She’s remembering the experience of finding herself at the McLean psychiatric hospital at 18 after an attempted suicide with vodka and aspirin and a single consultation with a therapist. In the production, directed by Jo Bonney, Susanna arrives there before realizing what has happened, a scene change that moves briskly enough to surprise you in the audience too. Susanna’s at the Frick with a teacher, gazing at the Vermeer that gives Kaysen’s memoir its name when she starts to sing. Then, abruptly, she’s with that doctor (Manoel Felciano, playing several “male presences”) who’s questioning her about a breakdown. Suddenly, orderlies are telling her to forfeit her sharp objects. “You’re not made of such unbreakable stuff,” she sings, in a song by Aimee Mann, “so you fall.”
The sequence is an effective use of the format of both a musical and a memory play, such that you can see how this creative team was drawn to the idea of dramatizing Kaysen’s memoir in the first place. The book, published in 1993, endures as a portrait of what it’s like to find yourself lost within an only intermittently caring system, especially because of the 1999 film with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. The movie is a straightforward and durable adaptation — Jolie’s electric performance won her an Oscar — but bringing the material to the stage has allowed a more fungible approach to the material, to both capture what happened to Kaysen and express what was flowing through her mind. The book, by Martyna Majok (of Cost of Living, which was also directed by Bonney), merges past and present through Susanna’s narration, while Bonney has the show’s ensemble onstage around her as their characters interject in Susanna’s story, sometimes to play a scene, sometimes to add commentary. They pace around her in a darkened teal set by the design team Dots that gives a damp and subterranean quality. The musical lasts nearly two hours without an intermission, which I wouldn’t always recommend but here adds a building sensation of sinking deeper and deeper into your seat as you watch. I caught myself holding my breath.
It’s in the score, however, where the immersion buckles — specifically in its integration with the rest of the material. Many of Aimee Mann’s songs are strong on their own, and she’s an unlikely but intriguing choice to score a musical: Why not have an idiosyncratic indie songwriter dramatize the inner lives of this group of young women? She’s excellent at rendering a song as single-perspective interior monologue: There are standout solo numbers for Gabi Campo’s Tori, a lilting recollection of the stifling privileged life that led to her addictions called “In Mexico,” and for Katherine Reis’s Daisy, a woman with a seemingly sexually abusive father who describes her apartment outside the institution with the gutting yet childishly singsong solo “Home by Now.” (Throughout, the work also benefits from simple but effective orchestration and crisp choral arrangements by music supervisor Todd Almond.)
But Mann’s writing is less adapted to group numbers — she tends to turn blandly anthemic — or to serving the needs of dramatic structure, and the songs don’t always mesh with Majok and Bonney’s work. There are sequences, such as when Susanna describes the rhythms of life at McLean and the constant, percussive interruptions of nurses barging into rooms for “checks,” where you expect a transition from dialogue to song and then oddly don’t get one. At other times, the music meditates on an image — there’s a tribute to Sylvia Plath, another famous McLean patient — that’s beautiful on its own but dramatically inert. Any new-to-the-stage songwriter may need time to acclimate to a new mode, and this particular case may be explained by the fact that Mann, according to reporting, is no longer actively involved in the show’s development. When this project was delayed by the pandemic, she released an album of music in 2021 that was inspired by Kaysen’s work. The show is still using some of those songs, giving the score’s relationship to the script a half-in, half-out near-jukebox feeling. You can feel Majok and Bonney trying to shape the show around material that was frozen too early in the process.
That’s a pity, because with further refinement, Girl, Interrupted could go deeper. Canfield, as proven by her work in Stereophonic, is extremely able at playing a character with a pristine, almost porcelain surface and roiling depths. (As also proven by Stereophonic, she has a singing voice suited to austere folk.) In the attention-stealing role of Lisa — the sui generis self-described sociopath that Jolie played on film — the indie-pop singer King Princess adapts well to theater. She’s rambunctious and funny, often sprawling around the stage, and if she’s still a tad stiff in more dramatic scenes, she’s well supported by the rest of the ensemble, including the ever-poignant Emily Skinner as her doctor, a woman carrying out practices you can tell she doesn’t quite believe will work. Near the end of the play, Majok’s script becomes, like Mann’s score, flatter and broader in its messaging, losing some of its sharpness of observation, and the humor that characterizes Kaysen’s memoir fades. But that’s a matter of calibration, and I think this material could get there with further revision and, if possible, further editing of that music — whether adding new material or rewriting the existing work — to better service the dramatic structure. It’s in the attention to detail that a piece like this will come fully alive.
