Girl, Interrupted comes in a choice of formats. Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir is a flippant quick read with an irresistible neurotic edge. The 1999 movie version features Angelina Jolie chewing the scenery around a quietly intense Winona Ryder. “Queens of the Summer Hotel,” the 2021 album by indie star Aimee Mann, is a collection of songs inspired by the book, its sweet melodies belying the dark undertone of its lyrics. Her tunes were originally meant to serve as the score of a staged musical, and now, after a COVID-era delay, they have arrived at the Public Theater as the backbone of a new work, with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Martyna Majok faithfully adapting Kaysen’s story, if not her impudent attitude.

Few things are as ripe for satire as the modern wedding industry, and Catherine Weingarten’s I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! gleefully plunges its horn into the target. This clever world premiere transforms one woman’s engagement anxiety into a satire about desire, denial, and the pressures placed on women to pursue happily-ever-after at any cost.

John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Jerome is a departure from the typical gay play that pops up in June, geared toward Pride month: its focus is older gay men. A chalkboard in front of the proscenium curtain charts the decline of Jerome, Ariz., a mining town, from 10,000 population (crossed out) to lesser numbers (also crossed out) to, finally, Ghost City. That’s a tipoff that this eerie, intriguing drama is going to be different.

Send-ups of television series have become a cottage industry in New York theater, but they usually target familiar, long-established properties. Dylan MarcAurele’s Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody arrives barely six months after HBO Max premiered Heated Rivalry, a hit drama about rival hockey players who become lovers. Under Alan Kliffer’s direction, the result is fresh and bawdy, and sung with serious voices by a talented cast, all of whom help with scene changes that boost the production’s sketch-comedy vibe.

Jean Genet’s The Maids remains one of the theater’s strangest and most unsettling explorations of class, identity, fantasy, and performance. In director Kip Williams’s “new version,” Genet’s world of ritualized role-playing is transplanted into the age of Instagram filters, live-streams, and social media influencer culture—a contemporary framework that proves surprisingly well-suited to Genet’s original obsessions.

In A Night of Chekhov, director Sanio Kurtesevic ambitiously compresses three lesser-known Anton Chekhov works into a brisk evening of comic despair and emotional misfire. While flashes of Chekhov’s wit emerge throughout Swan Song, The Proposal, and The Bear, the ensemble has not yet fully settled into the rhythms of the material, resulting in performances that often feel tentative and uneven.