‘Girl, Interrupted’ Portrays Mental Illness in the 1960s With Tender Mercy and Melody

The cultural upheaval of the 1960s helped usher in new rights and freedoms for many young women, but not, unsurprisingly, for anyone confined to a mental hospital. That’s the most obvious takeaway, at least, from “Girl, Interrupted,” a new musical based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the same title.“Girl” was previously adapted into a 1999 film starring Winona Ryder as, essentially, the author, and Angelina Jolie as Lisa Rowe, the most rebellious of her fellow patients at the asylum where Susanna is, in her late teens, held against her will for a year and a half following a suicide attempt. Ms. Kaysen was not pleased with certain liberties the film took, describing it more than once, according to IMDB, as “melodramatic drivel.”For the musical, playwright Martyna Majok has gone back to the original source material; the credits mention only Ms. Kaysen’s book. Ms. Majok would seem an ideal choice for the task: With plays such as “Queens,” “Sanctuary City,” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Cost of Living,” she has offered a perspective that’s both decidedly feminist and deeply humanist, depicting women and men on society’s margins with probing intelligence and grace.Ms. Majok’s libretto for “Girl, Interrupted,” now having its world premiere off-Broadway at the Public Theater, is accompanied by a score by Aimee Mann, a singer/songwriter who found pop stardom in the 1980s fronting the band ‘Til Tuesday, whose breakthrough hit, “Voices Carry,” followed a woman in an abusive relationship. Ms. Mann has since sustained respect as solo artist with songs that can also chart the paths of the alienated, often with lacerating wit.All these assets are all on display in the new musical, which those who have read Ms. Kaysen’s work, as I did just recently, will find truer to her story and sensibility than the screen version. That’s not to say this new “Girl,” which runs 110 minutes with no intermission, is entirely compelling, or convincing.Director Jo Bonney, whose many credits include premieres by other celebrated writers ranging from David Rabe and Eric Bogosian to Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks, has enlisted a company of appealing young actors led by Juliana Canfield, who made a winning Broadway debut two years ago in “Stereophonic,” as Susanna. They’re joined by Emily Skinner, a musical theater veteran cast as Dr. Wick, a steely, snooty shrink who repeatedly frustrates our heroine.Susanna’s real nemesis here, however, is what Ms. Majok defines in the script as The Male Presence, a collective identity applied to another pair of doctors as well as two men who figure into Susanna’s life before and after her incarceration. All are played by Manoel Felciano, and all, with the exception as an aide who barely speaks, emerge as callous and self-serving — destructive forces who function primarily to underline the misogyny that has, from Ms. Majok’s perspective and Ms. Kaysen’s, been instrumental in landing these women in their cuckoos’ nest. ‘The cast of ‘Girl Interrupted’ at the Public Theater. Jane MarcusIf, like me, you’re skeptical of stories in which none of the men have redeeming qualities — Ms. Kaysen’s book had at least one — this angle may interfere with the credibility of certain details and developments. The show, like the film, also tends to drag at times in its admirable efforts to flesh out supporting characters, among them Polly, who tried to set herself on fire, and Daisy, whose strange dietary and hygienic practices stem from a very unhealthy relationship with her dad.Sally Shaw’s earnest, girlish Polly and Katherine Reis’s coy, sassy Daisy are affecting enough, as are the other performances. King Princess suggests the mix of entitlement and abandonment that makes Lisa, consigned to her fate by wealthy and absent parents, a rebel without a pause; Ta’Rea Campbell brings both spine and sensitivity to the part of Valerie, a sympathetic but pragmatic nurse.Ms. Mann’s melodic, earthy tunes are another highlight; you can imagine them being sung by James Taylor, one of several famous former patients at the show’s McLean Hospital, the real-life psychiatric facility in Massachusetts where Ms. Kaysen spent time. Others have included Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, who have a song named after them, delivered with the moony reverence you would expect from these mostly privileged, troubled characters.Ms. Canfield anchors the show nicely, sustaining a smart, endearing presence throughout. Still, I left the theater wondering — as I did after reading Ms. Kaysen’s book, to be fair — how Susanna and other women born with substantial advantages would resign themselves with relative passivity to such a fate. Youth and naivete were likely factors, but were their choices so limited just six decades ago?There’s much more to be done in how we approach mental health and women’s rights. For now, “Girl, Interrupted” is perhaps best appreciated as a measure of progress.

‘Girl, Interrupted’ Portrays Mental Illness in the 1960s With Tender Mercy and Melody

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