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your truth. And that is so joyous and so fierce and so, so important for Frankie.

When Lauren Patten is singing “You Oughta Know,” you as Frankie have to stand on stage and just kind of...take in Jo’s hurt and rejection. What does it feel like to absorb that every night?

I think that moment when Lauren starts singing “You Oughta Know” is a moment of Frankie really understanding the effect she has on people. She grows up thinking that a lot of her actions don’t have consequences. And that’s not me saying that Frankie is reckless with her decisions. She just thinks that since no one really cares about her, no one’s going to hold her accountable for what she does. So she’s going to be yelling so someone can hear her and she’s going to be the most outspoken person, and she’s going to be the loudest in the room just so someone can hear her. And she doesn’t really realize that Jo has heard her the whole time.

Frankie obviously doesn’t think that she is a flawless person, but she is not really looking at herself when she is trying to fix a broken planet as one person. And when “You Oughta Know” starts, Frankie is still trying to excuse her actions, but it’s when she actually starts listening to what Jo is saying that Frankie understands that Jo felt abandoned, and that Frankie just sort of dumped all of her problems on Jo and ran away with some boy. And that’s a betrayal within itself. Especially in queer relationships—leaving a queer relationship for the safety and security and the cushiness of a straight relationship. And that’s a problem within itself that Frankie didn’t even understand. So when “You Oughta Know” starts, Frankie is hit with radical truth after radical truth after radical truth. And it’s heartbreaking for Frankie, obviously, but it’s really necessary.

Frankie is the outspoken activist of the show, always fighting for a cause. She presses her brother, Nick, into fighting for Bella after the assault. But it is interesting to see how, at the end of the show when you sing “No” during Bella’s rally, Frankie steps back a bit and is not the loudest voice in the crowd.

I think “No” is Frankie taking not a backseat, but a side seat, to a movement. I think it’s Frankie gathering all the materials

that she needs and then putting someone else at the fore-front and saying, “This is your story. I’m going to do what I can to help, but this isn’t something that I’m going to be able to do on my own.” It used to be Bella and Frankie hand-in-hand. And in rehearsal it changed, because it’s Frankie saying, “I have gathered as many people as I can. I have gotten all the signs, I’ve gotten the march map. Bella, go. Go tell your truth. Go and tell the truth and make sure everyone hears you.”

Technically, what is it like to sing Alanis’s songs? You have so many big belting moments throughout the show.

“Ironic” is such a fun song to sing, but it places my voice right at that point where my voice will break if I’m not really, really careful. So a lot of it is me reminding myself to “breathe from the wings.” Whenever I sing, I feel like I have a big old expensive pair of wings on my back. Especially in “Unprodigal Daughter,” where I’m thrashing my body around and also having to sing very difficult melody tracks. I try not to get so in my head, like, “Oh my God, I’m singing one of Alanis’s most iconic songs. What am I going to do?” Because I can’t panic. Then the story doesn’t get told.

You don’t sing like Alanis at all—nobody does—but do you still feel you are channeling her spirit when you sing her songs?

I think Alanis is everywhere in the show. The show is, ultimately, about the importance of communication and the importance of being honest with yourself and with the people around you for the greater good. And so much of that was communicated from Alanis herself. I think that’s where Alanis is, in every moment when someone tells the truth for the first time.

I love that moment at the very end of the show, when in the final second of “You Learn,” Frankie and Mary Jane clasp hands.

It’s a summary of what we’ve just been through. It’s not a bookend. It’s a checkpoint. Frankie and MJ at the end, we inhale together. We don’t exhale. It’s very important, because it’s very easy, especially after the two and a half hours, to be like, “We’re done. Hooray! We did it. It’s over.” No, it can’t be that. It has to be, “Great. What’s next? What can we do? How do we keep going?”