This piece discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 or text SAVE to 741741.
In 1967, Susanna Kaysen, an 18-year-old suffering from more than the usual amount of adolescent misery—with self-harming tendencies and one suicide attempt under her belt—was admitted to McLean, a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She found herself in a ward for teenage girls, convinced, naturally, that everyone around her was loopier than she was. Decades after the fact, Kaysen wrote "Girl, Interrupted," a perceptive account of her time at McLean, subsequently turned into a 1999 film starring Winona Ryder as Susanna. Think "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next" with more fingernail-painting.
Readers and movie lovers are still discovering and feeling seen by "Girl Interrupted," which has as much to say about "mental illness" (quotation marks are Kaysen's) as the anxiety and discombobulation of being a teenage girl. But the off-Broadway stage adaptation, now playing at the Public Theater, prompts the question: Is musical theater a fitting medium for a story involving schizophrenia, sexual abuse, and suicide?
Turns out, the idea is not as dubious as you might think. "Girl, Interrupted," the musical, boasts the most unlikely, most interesting new musical theater numbers to have premiered on a New York stage this year. The score is by the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, whose dreamy melodies and coolly disaffected, near conversational lyrical style keep the musical from sinking under the weight of its subject matter, or feeling like gratuitous trauma porn.