Let me attest, at the outset, to the hauntingly powerful—and, now, almost twenty-five years on, probably unreplicable—cultural permeation that the songs on Alanis Morissette’s third album, “Jagged Little Pill,” achieved after its release, in 1995. When its popularity began to crest, I was in sixth grade, at a largely black all-boys school, where hip-hop had a monopolistic hold on our pop-artistic attention and almost nobody admitted to watching the rockers and teenyboppers on MTV. Still, I can remember a friend of mine—Assata, named for the Black Liberation Army activist now in permanent exile, in Cuba; that’s how black and unlikely to be playing Alanis at home he was—sticking a finger in my face and shouting, “You! You! You!,” gearing up for but never arriving at Morissette’s famous “oughta know! ” Our cred depended on not knowing this song, but none of us could help knowing.
The album’s power rested in its total, terrifying specificity. It read less as a thematically linked cycle of songs than as an opera with a cast of one: Morissette, as a new kind of Gen X diva soprano, her hair everywhere and murder in her eye.
It’s strange, then, to see songs like “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” spread out and depersonalized, turned into situational anthems instead of markers of deep emotional truth, as they are in the new musical “Jagged Little Pill” (at the Broadhurst), directed by Diane Paulus, with a book by Diablo Cody (the writer of films such as “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body”) and choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Rather than putting the album’s mix of anger and love, forbearance and recrimination into one woman’s mind and threading those contradictions together in the telling of her life—in other words, rather than doing what each listener of “Jagged Little Pill” does by an instinctive act of imagination—Cody distributes them awkwardly among the members of a strained family, painting a tableau of white suburban anomie that feints at depth but, throughout the show’s two and a half hours, is always threatening to dissolve.
Mary Jane Healy (Elizabeth Stanley) is a wife and mother whose lifetime of anxiety, perfectionism, and self-avoidance has brought her to a crux. She’s suffered an injury in a car crash and is having trouble—more than anyone knows—kicking her painkillers. (That this plotline might have some punning relationship to the name of the show makes my ears ring.) Her husband, Steve (Sean Allan Krill), is distant and addicted to porn. (She surveils his Internet searches.) Their sex life is as dry as a riverbed in a drought. Their daughter, Frankie (a charismatic Celia Rose Gooding), who is black and was adopted, is a highly principled social-justice advocate at school but suffers daily indignities—we see somebody stroke her hair, that microaggressive cliché—and seems, increasingly, to hate her mom. Frankie’s brother, Nick (Derek Klena), is an overachieving swimmer headed to Harvard, who seems to be crumbling under his parents’ expectant pride. When faced with an ethical quandary concerning two of his classmates, his response shows that the moral part of his education has lagged far behind his grades and popularity.
The show checks off “issues” like boxes on an interminable medical form: transracial adoption and rape culture, opioids and bad marriages, catty neighbors and the perils of meritocracy, bisexuality, and, fleetingly, prayer. The suburbs of Connecticut are a middle-class surface under which all kinds of funky bacteria are thriving. There’s a sprinkle of Cheever and a dash of “Real Housewives,” all tightly Spanxed into the form of an after-school special. Adding to this topical muddle is the clutter onstage: the ensemble, dressed like a vaguely radical street gang—Doc Martens, sheer shirts, pointless vests—dances around the main characters at odd moments, adding welcome movement at the expense of cohesion. A series of panels meant to suggest the siding of a suburban house, but a bit too reminiscent of an aisle in Home Depot, glides around the stage, framing scene after scene.
To the extent that one theme predominates, it is a worthy one: the inner lives and imperilled freedom of women. This rhymes, in a way, with Morissette’s work. But the show’s insistence on making its story ever bigger, broader, and more inclusive—perhaps an effect of anxiety about the size of the Broadway stage—leaves each of its women underdescribed and essentially unknown.
The most powerful moment of the show comes when the focus is whittled down to one: Frankie’s best friend and occasional make-out partner, Jo (Lauren Patten), who finds out that Frankie has fallen in love with a new boy at school, Phoenix (Antonio Cipriano), and gives a galvanizing rendition of “You Oughta Know.” When I saw the show, Patten—a great singer—brought the house down. It was possible to imagine, for a moment, an entire story told through Jo’s eyes, and what a howl such a show might make.
Now try this for a portrait. A woman with a short bob, wearing well-tailored trousers and a fitted vest, picks up a rifle, aims it out the window at her lawn, stretches to her full, formidable height, and takes her best shot. Her name is Fefu (Amelia Workman), and the gun is pointed at her husband, who never shows up onstage. This is a game they play: before Fefu fires, her husband fills the gun’s chamber, never telling Fefu whether any of the bullets isn’t a blank. So goes the perilous game of chaining and dependency in marriage; and such, in its violence and whimsy, is the experience of watching “Fefu and Her Friends,” by the late María Irene Fornés, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in the play’s first Off Broadway revival since its première, in 1977.
Fefu, so real and electrically idiosyncratic that she might at any moment up and leave the theatre, stroll down Fulton Street, and start apartment hunting in Fort Greene, has invited a group of women to her house so that they can run through the program of an upcoming educational fund-raiser. Fefu’s restlessness and loose tongue—she claims not to like other women—scandalize the mousy Christina (Juliana Canfield) and amuse Cindy (Jennifer Lim), a cooler customer who’s used to Fefu’s shtick. More friends file in, and soon the drawing room looks fit to burst with their hopes and secrets, hanging before us like the armada of art on Fefu’s bright-green wall.
The second act is a marvel. The audience is split into four groups, each making its way through four parts of Fefu’s house: the drawing room, a whimsical kitchen, a lawn bedecked for a game of croquet, and—thanks to a glass floor—a dismal basement where Julia (a brilliant, unnerving Brittany Bradford), who’s been physically incapacitated for reasons that are unclear to her friends, carries on a conversation with someone unseen. Something’s wrong down there, and the trouble might be Fefu’s before long. The set piece rips away the artifice that so often congenially pillows our notions of theatre. As we walked around Adam Rigg’s intricate doll house of a set, ropes and pulleys and bits of black tape flopped into view, and some of the people in my group started talking about holiday plans.
You could call this a distraction. I wished that the wristbands that designated our groups didn’t also denote which of us could sit and which should stand. This pageant of movement insists on a flattening equality among the different perspectives, and I didn’t like to be reminded of hierarchy, which already poisons too many of the theatre’s trappings. Still, I felt pleasantly plucked out of place. “Life is theatre,” one of the women says. And theatre, in turn, is a feverishly wallpapered fun-house version of life, whose totality none of us can tell. Here we were, walking the line between the two.
The otherworldly effect was this: on the lawn (the last stop for my group), when Fefu’s hands grazed those of her friend Emma (Helen Cespedes)—this play is, among other things, a map of little erotic touches—I felt my hand grazed, too. I left the theatre and kept looking around corners for new sets to discover. ♦
