About the Show

A stage adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir set inside a 1960s psychiatric hospital.

This world-premiere adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Martyna Majok, brings Susanna Kaysen’s memoir to the stage with original music by Aimee Mann and choreography by Sonya Tayeh. The play follows Susanna’s admission to a psychiatric institution, where she navigates an environment that functions as both a safe haven and a source of confinement. As she forms relationships with other young women in the ward, the work examines their efforts to regain structure, autonomy, and a sense of direction within the hospital’s constraints. Directed by Jo Bonney, the production presents a new dramatization of Kaysen’s account.

Critic Reviews (10)

"...avoiding the film’s feel-bad glamour and copying (with intermittent success) the memoir's anthropological dispassion."
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"In its strongest moments, the 'play with music' adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's memoir Girl, Interrupted captures the riptide sensation of being pulled far from safe shores."
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"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."
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"Brought back together for this production, the competition between the scripted scenes and the score leads to an evening you might characterize as being filled with its own"
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Majok has demonstrated her insightfulness as an excavator of marginalized lives; disappointingly, the ones in "Girl, Interrupted" remain unearthed.
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“Girl, Interrupted” is a powerful piece of theater that deserves to be seen, just as the women at the core of this story should have been seen and possibly saved.
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simultaneously more authentic and more artful than the movie (also less linear.)
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‘Girl, Interrupted’ celebrates the strength in sisterhood, and the power of music and storytelling to find meaning in the darkest episodes of human experience. ★★★★☆
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