Theatre in Review: Girl, Interrupted (Public Theater)

	Juliana Canfield, Emily Skinner. Photo: Joan Marcus

It must have looked good on paper: provocative source material, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Martyna Majok), an iconic alt-rock songwriter (Aimee Mann), and a leading director (Jo Bonney). But this constellation of talents assembles to startlingly little effect. No one involved in Girl, Interrupted seems to have any idea how to make a musical out of Susanna Kaysen's celebrated memoir of the same name. The result is a series of static, melancholy tableaux, narratively weak and musically monotonous. It's the ultimate sad-girl musical.

Kaysen's book was acclaimed for its unsparing account of her stay, in the late 1960s, in McLean Hospital, portrayed as a pricey storehouse for wealthy problem children. James Mangold's 1999 film -- a vehicle for Winona Ryder with a stars-of-tomorrow cast including Clea DuVall, Brittany Murphy, Elisabeth Moss, and Angelina Jolie -- captures, with a semi-documentary authority, the grim, gritty details of a grind designed as much for submission as therapy. The book was, apparently, informed by a searching, sardonic point of view; reviewer Susan Cheever called it "triumphantly funny." The film packs the narrative momentum of the best prison dramas; will Susanna, the spirited heroine, ever escape the institution's Kafkaesque environment, allegedly dedicated to keeping her safe from herself?

The exercise at the Public is devoid of humor or suspense. Unfolding in a void covered in peeling institutional-green paint and dominated by an enormous cylinder that frequently descends to the stage level (the scenic design is by the collective dots), the musical is structured as a series of quiet vignettes -- the endless rounds of patient checks, drug regimes, and unprofitable counseling sessions -- none of which ever coalesce into anything dramatic. These are punctuated by numbers so low-key that they fail to incite applause. It's difficult to think of another recent musical so lacking in emotional or melodic variety.

Even more damaging are the script's vague characterizations. Susana has been caught flirting with a teacher -- or was it more? We are never told -- and making a half-hearted suicide attempt. After being railroaded into a brief meeting with a doctor she has never met, she voluntarily signs herself into McLean for reasons that are never explained. She has an unseen boyfriend who drops by for a quick bout of oral sex before heading off to Oxford, from which he posts a marriage proposal that serves as the musical's deus ex machine. But he doesn't even rate a name, and her feelings about him remain unknown. Juliana Canfield, who plays Susanna, is, as always, a markedly self-possessed presence, and, moving from the prologue to the main action, sheds twenty years in full view. But without a fully realized character, she remains hamstrung.

Her fellow inmates fare no better. Gabi Campo is Tori, a drug addict who is terrified of being taken back to Mexico City by her family in a subplot that begs for explication. Mia Pak, gifted with the cast's best voice, is Grace, an oasis of calm until she inexplicably descends into a catatonic state. Katherine Reis is Daisy, who collects chicken carcasses (don't ask) before meeting a terrible fate. Sally Shaw is Polly, disfigured from a self-administered fire, whose demons are left to our imagination. King Princess is Lisa, the group's proud "psychopath" and ringleader who, even more than the others, cries out for some sort of backstory.

The show proudly refuses to pathologize these characters, but it could at least tell us something about them. Rather than probing their agonies or exploring the sociopolitical implications of their hospitalizations, Girl, Interrupted fetishizes them, coming perilously close to suggesting that their suffering confers on them a sort of saintly victimhood. They're women; therefore, they suffer. (A couple of scenes featuring them watching a television broadcasting news of the era's social unrest are the most we get of the outside world.)

The best performances come from a trio of veteran performers who know how to conjure something out of nothing: Ta'Rea Campbell as a nurse who goes along to get along; Manoel Felciano as various unsatisfactory males; and, best of all, Emily Skinner as Susanna's stolid, unimaginative, yet not unsympathetic therapist, sadly aware of her profession's limits. (In one of the most amusing bits, she urges Susanna, already bent on being a writer, to pursue a career as -- wait for it -- a dental technician. Read the room, doctor!)

Mann's score, sensitively arranged by Todd Almond, opens on an effective note with the ballad "You Fall," about living on the edge of sanity, and includes a charmingly offhand tribute to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, two of McLean's roll call of celebrity alumni. ("She shoulda got a refund. Sylvia," Susanna notes, amusingly; well, she's not wrong.) But their enigmatic words and constant tone of disillusionment fail to fill out the characters or support Majok's alarmingly underwritten script.

Bonney's direction consists mostly of posing the cast in different arrangements suggesting depression and social isolation. The off-putting scenic design aside, Heather Gilbert's lighting creates any number of strongly angled, highly theatrical looks; Sarah Laux's costumes have a solid period feel, especially Skinner's immaculately tailored, color-coordinated suits; and Dan Moses Schreier's sound design is as clean and clear as anyone could wish.

The show ends with an epilogue, twenty years later, indicating that Susanna, all grown up, hasn't gained much contentment or self-knowledge; it's a dispiriting conclusion. An essay in the program indicates that Girl, Interrupted "isn't a critique of contemporary clinical practice," adding that it is "a delicate and closely observed account of young women whose sense of mental stability is fragile, and who live in a society practiced at removing agency from young women." Delicate? Fine. Closely observed? Hardly. As for the rest, at least two of the McLean girls are self-destructive, and one is terrified of being released into the real world; hospitalization may be their only realistic option, even if it is an objectively terrible one. There's a very good point to be made about psychiatric treatment as a tool of social control. But this show doesn't make it. --David Barbour