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“ALL I REALLY WANT ”:

AT HOME
WITH THE
HEALYS

In February 2019, the Healy family—Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), Nick (Derek Klena), Steve (Sean Allan Krill), and Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley)—met in the velvet seats of the Broadhurst Theatre to discuss “All I Really Want” and what it meant to them to become a family throughout the making of Jagged Little Pill.

“All I Really Want” is the first song you all sing together as a family in the show, as you are sitting down at a celebratory breakfast for Nick getting into Harvard. What do you think your characters are feeling at the start of the show, during this scene?

ELIZABETH STANLEY: Mary Jane is very much in survival mode, but she is high functioning. She’s still fooling herself that everything is just fine and really perfect and totally great. I think Frankie is behaving in a way that is usual and which she finds frustrating, but it’s not anything new. And she really wants to celebrate Nick and this big, exciting accomplishment of getting accepted into Harvard. Steve, well, she just finds it kind of annoying that at breakfast he brings up their sex life…. I think every day, Mary Jane is quite consumed with her addiction, and so that’s kind of the overriding thing that she’s actually thinking about and dealing

with. Putting her energy into these other three people is kind of a distraction.

CELIA ROSE GOODING: I think that Frankie is aware that she is just living her truth, but it rubs her entire family the wrong way. I think she is at this point where she’s sort of just like, “If it’s going to bother you, fine. I’m going to do what I want because I am an independent, grown woman, and I can do what I want at the age of sixteen.” And even though the Healy life for Frankie has always been very Nick-centered, with Nick getting into this incredible school, it is just another thing that makes Frankie feel isolated—and when she feels isolated, she lashes out. So Frankie is constantly working in the place of, “See me as who I am and not as what you want me to be.”

DEREK KLENA: The first time we really see Nick, he’s having the experience that his entire family and he has worked for his entire life. So you’re kind of seeing him at the peak. And then from that peak, he’s at that crossroads between

adolescence and young adulthood and finding out, “This is the person that I was built to be and conditioned to be. Is this somebody that I want to continue being for the rest of my life, and am I satisfied with the product?” And as Nick starts to see his family and his friends and the world around them celebrate this supposed prize, there’s that feeling of emptiness that he’s starting to realize comes with that success.

SEAN ALLAN KRILL: You meet this family in crisis. Almost a year earlier, there was Mary Jane’s car accident. And I think what’s happened is that Steve’s in a little bit of a renaissance, like he’s woken up a little bit because he was shaken awake by that. He’s looking at his family going, “Wow, this isn’t right. Something’s wrong. What is it?” So he’s reaching out.

You have to show this family at its optimal state before we start to see the slow and steady decline, and then the