Susanna Kaysen was treated for eighteen months at the same psychiatric hospital as James Taylor, Sylvia Plath and Ray Charles.
“Does this nuthouse, like, specialize in writers and artist-types,” asks Juliana Canfield as Susanna, in the new musical based on Kaysen’s memoir.
“Maybe writers and artist-types specialize in nuthouses,” replies her fellow patient Lisa, portrayed by the pop star King Princess, in an impressive stage debut.
It’s an exchange you won’t remember from the 1999 movie adaptation of Kaysen’s memoir, which starred Winona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie as Lisa (Jolie, who won an Oscar for her performance, happens to be celebrating her birthday today.) The movie used a fictitious name for the institution, rather than the real one — McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.
The exchange is a clue to the different approach that the stage version takes, simultaneously more authentic and more artful (also less linear.) But “Girl, Interrupted” still offers the familiar story that drew in generations of readers and viewers, of the friendship and community that Susanna developed with the other young women in the institution – individuals made vivid by a memorable ensemble cast.
Adapted by the Pulitzer winning playwright Martyna Majok, “Girl, Interrupted“ has become a memory play, with Susanna looking back twenty years to her experience as a teenager in the hospital in the 1960s, after a suicide attempt.
One by one she meets
Lisa (King Princess), who insists on calling herself a psychopath, and routinely escapes but then happily returns;
Grace (Mia Pak) who becomes Susanna’s roommate and shares her ambition to be a writer and an affinity with Sylvia Path (they both recite passages from her poetry that they’ve memorized);
Polly (Sally Shaw), the most cheerful of the group though arguably the most self-destructive; she once set herself on fire;
Daisy (Katherine Reis), who is collecting roasted chickens under her bed brought to her by her possibly abusive father;
Tori (Gabi Campo), an emotional captive of her parents back in Mexico, here shown with Ta’Rea Campbell, who portrays Valerie, the sympathetic and down-to-earth nurse
Each of these woman are troubled, but, we are encouraged to believe, made worse by the men in their lives (including the doctors), all of whom are portrayed with varying degrees of villainy by Manoel Felciano
The scenes are interspersed with 15 songs by Grammy winning singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, who first released them as the 2021 album “Queens of the Summer Hotel.” The classically-tinged introspective folk-rock music feature poetic lyrics that only rarely advance the story. In the song The Psychopath, Lisa offers to give Susannah a tour of the facilities:
“This is where we watch the TV
The electroshock, the ice cold baths,
It’s all so easy breezy when you’re a psychopath.”
It all feels so unlike a conventional musical score that the audience somehow knows not to applaud them.
I thought of Mann’s unusual approach during another exchange about art and madness, which Susanna has with another another patient, this time her roommate Grace (Mia Pak) “Do you think there’s something about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers crazy?”
“The opposite, I think,” Grace replies. “I think we all need to hear our sorrow structured into sound.”
Girl, Interrupted
Public Theater through July 12
Running time: 110 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $129
Book by Martyna Majok, based on the book by Susanna Kaysen
Original Music by Aimee Mann
Choreography by Sonya Tayeh
Directed by Jo Bonney
Scenic design by dots, costume design by Sarah Laux, lighting design by Heather Gilbert, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier, hair, wig, and makeupdesign by J.Jared Janas, and prop management by Claire M. Kavanah. Todd Almondprovidesorchestrations for productionand servesas the music supervisor. Andrea Grodyis the music director.Patrick Mulryanis the dialect coach
Cast: Leela Bassuk (Understudy), Ta’Rea Campbell (Valerie), Gabi Campo(Tori), Juliana Canfield(Susanna), Eileen Doan(Understudy), Manoel Felciano(The Male Presence), King Princess(Lisa), Gunnar Manchester(Understudy), Mia Pak(Grace), Katherine Reis (Daisy), Anna Roman(Understudy), Sally Shaw(Polly), Emily Skinner (Dr. Wick), Rachel Stern(Understudy), and Lauren Jeanne Thomas(Judy/Musician)
“A Woman Among Women,” playwright Julia May Jonas’ reimagining of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” from a female perspective, opens at Lincoln Center’s Clare Tow Theater tonight in a smart, sharp, deceptively casual, and ultimately gutting production that’s largely an intact transfer (with just a few cast changes) from its run at the Bushwick Starr in 2024. Since that time, attention is being paid to Miller’s work even more than usual. The current Broadway run of his most acclaimed play “Death of a Salesman” is likely to shine on Tony night. Last year, Kimberly Belflower’s play “John Proctor is the Villain” had an acclaimed run on Broadway; it, too, applied a female perspective, albeit in a very different way, to one of Miller’s plays, “The Crucible.”
Jonas, who has made a project out of responding to well-known dramas by male playwrights. (such as Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” and Sam Shepard’s “True West,”) is careful and clever in how she transposes the male characters in “All My Sons” to female characters in her own play. Both plays have ten characters, and there is some precise one-to-one correlation.
Miller’s play focuses on a man named Joe Keller, whom he describes in the script as “a man among men.” This is what gives Jonas her title, and her assignment: As she puts it in a program note, her play is an attempt to discover what “a woman among women” might mean.
That woman is named Cleo (standout Dee Pelletier.) In the Miller play, Joe is a largely uneducated, self-made man who owns an airplane parts factory. Cleo has a PhD and runs a mental health wellness center for women. But what’s most important is that Joe and Cleo are both guilty of something they have tried to keep secret. Joe allowed his factory to send out faulty airplane engines, resulting in the deaths of American pilots in the war, a crime he blamed on his business partner, who went to jail. Cleo’s secret, which I won’t spoil, also affected her loved ones and her community.
Both plays follow the general rules of Greek tragedy, but Jonas also offers echoes of Miller in specific moments. At the beginning of Miller’s play, for example, Joe and his doctor neighbor talk idly about how the newspaper is predicting rain that night – to which the doctor replies “Then it can’t rain.” In the Jonas play, Cleo says her phone says that it’s raining, and her doctor neighbor Sarah points out that it isn’t raining.
A newspaper’s possibly faulty forecast is not the same as a smart phone’s outright present-moment inaccuracy. That may be the point: The authoritative (which often means the male perspective) isn’t always trustworthy.
“A Woman Among Women” is not just an exercise in transposition; it takes on a life of its own.
When I saw this production in Brooklyn in 2024, I wondered whether I enjoyed it more because it was the first show in the Bushwick Starr’s new permanent venue — clean, open, well-lit, welcoming, yet an adventure (at least for me) to get to, on a dark and forbidding-looking block. I’ll admit that there is less of an adventure to go to a show at Lincoln Center. But as in Bushwick, under Sarah Hughes direction, the cast seems just to be hanging out in a backyard, sitting right next to members of the audience; they are able to seem casual during most of their time on stage, and playful during sudden, joyful musical interludes, as if they’re just living their lives. But they are at the same time persuasively inhabiting their characters. This makes a difference when the set suddenly transforms into something more formal, and the characters confront one another, revealing the kind of intractable moral dilemma to which Jonas is most drawn — which is how (as she tells us in her note) she and Miller “most align as artists.”
A Woman Among Women
Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater through June 28
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $38.50
Written by Julia May Jonas
Directed by Sarah Cameron Hughes
Brittany Vasta (Set Design), Wendy Yang (Costume Design), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (Lighting Design), Kate Marvin (Sound Design), Brian Cavanaugh-Strong (Music and Music Direction),
Cast: Brittany K. Allen as ‘Christine,’ Gabriel Brown as ‘Roy,’ Tina Chilip as ‘Tina,’ Zoë Geltman as ‘Grace,’ Morgan Siobhan Green as ‘Rida/Trisha,’ Hannah Heller as ‘Sarah,’ Lucy Kaminsky as ‘Tammy,’ Drew Lewis as ‘Lane,’ and Dee Pelletier as ‘Cleo.’
