In 1967, 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen was admitted to the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, following a suicide attempt. Decades later, she wrote the best-selling memoir Girl, Interrupted, chronicling her approximately two-year stay inside the facility, where she observed and befriended her fellow patients. Then, in 1999, that book became a cult-classic film starring Winona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie as Lisa, a lovable sociopath with microbangs.

Now, Kaysen’s story—a foundational text for generations of misunderstood young women—is being revived for the stage at The Public Theater. With a book by playwright Martyna Majok (Cost of Living), songs by Aimee Mann, and choreography by Sonya Tayeh, this telling of Girl, Interrupted, directed by Jo Bonney, is a memory play, with musical interludes threaded through a largely nonlinear accounting of events. For Bonney, the set functioned “as both the interior of McLean and the interior of Susanna’s mind.”

The movie may now be the most familiar version of the story—and the one the actors knew best going into the project—but the play adapts the memoir, which Majok was enthralled by. “I fell for [Kaysen’s] voice, her dry wit and clear-eyed perspective, her humor and heartache,” she says. “With muscular, economical language, she had collected these extraordinary characters that lived so loudly on the page.”

And those characters are being played by an extraordinary cast, with Juliana Canfield, of Succession and Stereophonic, inhabiting the role of Susanna, opposite King Princess as Lisa. The residents at McLean are rounded out by Valerie (Ta’Rea Campbell), Tori (Gabi Campo), Grace (Mia Pak), Daisy (Katherine Reis), Polly (Sally Shaw), and the ominous Male Presence (Manoel Feliciano).

Canfield recalls seeing the film as a teenager and being taken by Ryder’s performance. “She’s like Audrey Hepburn, but she’s grittier and darker,” she says. “She’s gamine, but also gutsy and emotional.”

Though it’s not exactly a musical, the songs in this play are crucial to the emotional journeys of its characters, charting their pain and insecurities. The girls of McLean are all part of the chorus; in one haunting song, they harmonize to ask: “What’s to become of me?”

“This play goes to really dark, underexplored caverns of the human mind and heart,” Canfield says. “And I think music is a way to go to those places.”

For King Princess, a musician and recording artist, Girl, Interrupted represents the first time an acting role has required her to sing. For someone who doesn’t read sheet music, this has been no minor thing. “It’s weird to feel bad at something that you’re good at,” she muses.

Playing Lisa, a sly charmer with a penchant for sneaking out of the ward, also posed other challenges. In preparation for the part, she read Patric Gagne’s Sociopath: A Memoir, which gave her insight into Lisa’s diagnosis. “She’s the coolest and most layered character I’ve ever played… which isn’t saying much, ’cause I’ve been in, like, three things,” King Princess says with a laugh. “But she’s kind of a ringleader, and she’s very cat-like. She’s predatory, in a sense.”

What does it mean to be crazy? What does it mean to be well? What is recovery, and is it ever really possible? And what is the link between creativity and madness? (One song in the play references other real-life patients of McLean—namely, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and James Taylor—probing the margin between mental illness and artistic genius.) The play raises all of these questions, resisting any simple answers.

To help them navigate the play’s emotional demands, the cast has been working with an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. During rehearsals, she spoke to them about the importance of “de-roleing” at the end of the day, a process that looks slightly different for every actor. For Gabi Campo, the practice has never been one “big ritual,” but rather a series of “small, intentional practices.” “I shake out tension, sometimes quite aggressively!”

In an introduction to the 30th-anniversary edition of Girl, Interrupted, Kaysen reflected on her initial impetus to write the book as a quasi-anthropological examination of the ward during her hospitalization. In doing so, she left a lot out—which, she surmises, “is why the book found so many readers.” Several iterations later, Kaysen’s story still speaks to so many.

Mia Pak, who plays Susanna’s roommate, Grace, is grateful for the chance to foreground narratives that remain underexplored. “I’m sure people are going to relate to them and also think of loved ones in their lives that maybe they have kept at an arm’s length or haven't fully understood,” she says. “I can’t wait to share it with people.”

Girl, Interrupted begins previews on May 13. Its opening night is set for June 4.