Girl, Interrupted review – mental health memoir reborn as patchy Aimee Mann-soundtracked musical

The Public Theater, New York

Susanna Kaysen’s retelling of her time in a psychiatric hospital in the 60s became an Oscar-winning movie in the 90s and now it’s an elegant, if limited, play

In 2021, the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann (perhaps best known, as a solo artist, for her contributions to the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia) released an album called Queens of the Summer Hotel, a collection of somewhat narrative tunes inspired by Susanna Kaysen’s bestselling memoir of mental health struggle, Girl, Interrupted. Mann had been commissioned to write the songs for a stage adaptation that took years (and the duration of a pandemic) to materialize. Now finally at the Public Theater in Manhattan, Girl, Interrupted is a sturdy showcase for Mann’s gorgeous, shimmering-sad compositions, but perhaps a less successful conduit for Kaysen’s arguments.

The press materials for Girl, Interrupted are careful to stress one point of distinction: this is a “play with music”, not, strictly, a musical. The former term has been around for a long time, but eludes exact definition. It’s a “know it when you see it” (or hear it) kind of a thing. Girl, Interrupted, though, fits rather comfortably under the rubric of the traditional musical. The songs may not advance the plot, exactly, but they do offer crucial insight into the inner lives of the troubled young women encountered by a fictionalized Susanna at McLean, a storied psychiatric hospital in suburban Boston.