78 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
THETHEATRE
PLAYING HOUSE
The new musical “Jagged Little Pill ” and a revival of “Fefu and Her Friends.”
BYVINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY SONIA PULIDO
ing, “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 the
matically linked cycle of songs than
as an opera with a cast of one: Moris
sette, as a new kind of Gen X diva so
prano, 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 sit
uational 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, forbear
ance and recrimination into one wom
an’s mind and threading those contra
dictions 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 imagina
tion—Cody distributes them awkwardly
among the members of a strained fam
ily, painting a tableau of white suburban
anomie that feints at depth but, through
out 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 plot
line might have some punning relation
ship 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 char
ismatic Celia Rose Gooding), who is
black and was adopted, is a highly prin
cipled socialjustice advocate at school
but suffers daily indignities—we see
somebody stroke her hair, that micro
aggressive cliché—and seems, increas
ingly, to hate her mom. Frankie’s brother,
Nick (Derek Klena), is an overachiev
ing swimmer headed to Harvard, who
seems to be crumbling under his par
ents’ 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 neigh
bors and the perils of meritocracy, bisex
uality, and, fleetingly, prayer. The sub
urbs of Connecticut are a middleclass
surface under which all kinds of funky
bacteria are thriving. There’s a sprinkle
of Cheever and a dash of “Real House
wives,” all tightly Spanxed into the form
of an afterschool special. Adding to this
topical muddle is the clutter onstage: the
L
et me attest, at the outset, to the
hauntingly powerful—and, now,
almost twentyfive 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 pop
ularity began to crest, I was in sixth
grade, at a largely black allboys school,
where hiphop had a monopolistic hold
on our popartistic attention and al
most nobody admitted to watching the
rockers and teenyboppers on MTV. Still,
I can remember a friend of mine—As
sata, 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 shout
