An achingly beautiful new blend of drama and music, Girl, Interrupted has been exquisitely crafted from Susanna Kaysen’s memoir regarding the many months she spent as a teenager in a psychiatric facility. Readers of Kaysen’s story (unlike me) can judge how faithfully the original is followed, but the strange musical loveliness and abiding sensitivity of this play infused with a dozen or so striking songs will soon be obvious to anyone who sees the very fine production that premiered Thursday at the Public Theater.
Martyna Majok, the Pulitzer-winning playwright, has adapted the text. Aimee Mann, the Grammy Award-winning songwriter, provides the intermittent musical numbers tightly integrated into the story. Their approach to the troubling issue of mental illness is modern, understated and intimate. Directed with taste and grace by Jo Bonney and very well performed, Girl, Interrupted is a plaintive study in madness and social oppression. Although the show is terribly sad, the artistry is admirable and the effect is genuinely poignant.
Kaysen’s backwards glance to 1967 gently begins with 17-year-old Susanna’s easy admission into a Massachusetts psychiatric institution for depression after swallowing 50 aspirins. “Don’t you think you need a rest?” suggests the nice doctor. As her story unfolds, Susanna (Juliana Canfield), an aspiring writer, talks to the audience as much as to herself while encountering other patients in the women’s ward at McLean Hospital, where celebrated artists like Sylvia Plath and James Taylor had been treated.
There’s the rowdy Lisa (King Princess), gaily identifying as a psychopath; Polly (Sally Shaw), an overgrown schoolgirl disfigured from setting herself on fire; Grace (Mia Pak), Susanna’s roomie and another depressed lover of Plath’s poetry; Daisy (Katherine Reis), whose sexy heart belongs to daddy in the wrong way; Tori (Gabi Campo), an amphetamines-craving heiress from Mexico; and then there’s Dr. Wick (Emily Skinner), a brisk, British analyst, along with nurses Valerie (Ta’Rea Campbell) and Judy (Lauren Jeanne Thomas), plus “The Male Presence” (Manoel Felciano) of doctors, dads and bad dates. “What’s to become of me? What am I doing here?” Susanna and others sing. Things do not turn out well for many of them.
As the 110-minute work swiftly develops, it grows apparent that to some extent Susanna and others are victims of a paternal 1960s society which insists women conform to traditional ways. Individual stories emerge as their daily routines of group therapy, counseling, medication distribution, and safety checks by the staff occur, at times choreographed by Sonya Tayeh in ritual movements. Majok deftly structures the episodic drama, dealing out quick, naturally realistic and occasionally rhythmic talk.
Sometimes spliced with dialogue, Mann’s refreshingly melodic songs tend to be delicate and meditative, although a tensile strength to these compositions usually drives them beyond merely melancholy. Strong rhythms and crisp, often mordant lyrics for a dozen songs like Polly’s “Burn It Out” rationale for torching herself (“Shadows and scenes that would not stay put, I could redact them with ash and soot…”) and a savage “Suicide is Murder” number for Susanna and the ensemble are woven closely into the storytelling. The score is lightly orchestrated by Todd Almond for keyboard, strings and flute (both Felciano and Thomas play instruments onstage). Vocal arrangements are especially harmonious and the ensemble’s concerted voices on many of the songs sound ravishing.
Dressed by designer Sarah Laux mostly in casual mid-1960s clothes, the artists are a tightly knit crew whose individual performances are vital and highly appealing under Bonney’s typically sensitive direction. The staging is particularly graceful, and the sorrowful proceedings never turn lugubrious.
Beyond the frame of the Public’s airy 198-seat Martinson Hall stage, the dots design collective provides a deep, open space in mottled greens. Illuminated as a twilight world of shifting shadows by designer Heather Gilbert, a turntable and a scattering of chairs are employed to fluently change locations. Hovering ominously above everything, a large, circular, transparent object descends a few times to disclose projected images. It represents, of course, the glass bell jar Sylvia Plath once wrote about; a poetic metaphor for feeling isolated and trapped within her illness.
Despite its excellence, the challenging subject of Girl, Interrupted makes it unlikely to win popular appeal. It is a chamber piece, not a blockbuster. Fans of Mann and Marjok, as well as theatergoers truly interested in viewing fresh, vital, new works of music drama should try to get a ticket to this compelling production.
Girl, Interrupted opened June 4, 2026, at the Public Theater and runs through July 12. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
