At The Public Theater, a ‘Girl, Interrupted’ for a New Generation

Reported by Vogue.

Susanna Kaysen's memoir has already been a bestselling book and a 1999 cult film starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Now it's becoming something else entirely: a memory play with music, staged at The Public Theater, with an opening night set for June 4. According to Vogue, the production features a book by Martyna Majok (Cost of Living), songs by Aimee Mann, choreography by Sonya Tayeh, and direction from Jo Bonney — who conceived the set as simultaneously the interior of McLean Hospital and the interior of Susanna's mind. It's an ambitious frame for a story that has never stopped being relevant.

Majok, who adapted directly from Kaysen's memoir rather than the film, describes being drawn to the source's "dry wit and clear-eyed perspective" and its "muscular, economical language." The cast assembled around that language is equally sharp. Juliana Canfield (Succession, Stereophonic) plays Susanna, with musician King Princess stepping into the Angelina Jolie-shaped role of Lisa — the ward's feline, predatory ringleader. To prepare, King Princess read Patric Gagne's Sociopath: A Memoir and describes Lisa as "the coolest and most layered character I've ever played." The self-deprecating addendum: "which isn't saying much, 'cause I've been in, like, three things."

What Music Does That Dialogue Can't

This isn't quite a musical — think something stranger and more unsettling. The girls of McLean form a chorus, their harmonies surfacing questions the play refuses to answer cleanly: What's to become of me? One song name-checks real McLean alumni — Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ray Charles, James Taylor — pressing on the uncomfortable relationship between mental illness and artistic genius. For Canfield, music is the mechanism that grants access to "really dark, underexplored caverns." For King Princess, who doesn't read sheet music, being asked to sing in a theatrical context meant confronting a genuinely disorienting experience: "It's weird to feel bad at something that you're good at."

The production has also brought in intimacy coordinator Ann James to help the cast manage the emotional weight of the material. De-roling — the practice of shedding a character at the end of rehearsal — looks different for everyone. Gabi Campo, who plays Tori, relies on "small, intentional practices" rather than grand rituals: "I shake out tension, sometimes quite aggressively." It's a small detail that says something large about what this story asks of the people telling it.

Kaysen herself once wrote that she left a great deal out of her memoir — and that omission, she believes, is exactly what made it resonate with so many readers. Decades on, the questions her story raises about sanity, recovery, and what it means to be misunderstood haven't grown easier to answer, which is precisely why they still deserve a stage.

Read the original at Vogue.