When Michaela Coel saw Maia Novi’s hit off-broadway play, she asked the writer and star what novel she had based her work off of. But Invasive Species — now playing at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington — is very much based on a true story. Novi’s true story.
In 2022, Novi was in her final year of drama school at Yale when she developed insomnia from stress. But when she sought medical help, she was given a sleeping pill and woke up in a psychiatric ward for young people. It was almost three weeks before she could convince them of her sanity and be released. Journaling kept her sane, and she transformed her diary entries into a dark comedy she describes to me as “Evita, but set in a psych ward”.
Novi is Argentinian, and her story was complicated at every stage by her immigration status as an aspiring actress desperate to make it in American films. She couldn’t sleep, she explains, because she was so anxious over her end of year showcase. “I was really nervous,” says Novi. “For international students, in order to get a visa you need to have an agent so that you can book a job, and if you book a job you're eligible to be an ‘alien of extraordinary abilities’, and then you can get an artist's visa.”
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But her professors told her it would be tricky to stand out in the showcase for the same reason she so wanted to succeed. “My teachers in school were like, we just don't know how to place you. Because you don't look Latina, but you don’t sound fully American.” Not looking ‘Latina enough’ is an “ignorant stereotype” says Novi, but she was determined to rid herself of her accent by the end of term.
She embarked on a gruelling dialect training regime called key phrasing where you hook your ability to slip into an accent on repeating a phrase. Novi was assigned Gweneth Paltrow to imitate. “I just started listening to Gwyneth Paltrow on repeat, nonstop, interviews, podcasts, movies, and listening to that key phrase, which was: Good morning, guys. I'm going to take you through my morning Goop routine.”
“He asked me how I would describe my insomnia. I described it as ‘my inner monologue is rushing’”
That would be enough to send anyone slightly loopy, but Novi was perfectly sane in the run up to the showcase. She just couldn’t sleep, and the insomnia was worrying her. Having exhausted every natural remedy, she went to see a psychiatrist in the hope of being prescribed sleeping pills. But miscommunication, exacerbated by the language barrier, led to the appointment taking a terrifying turn.
“He asked me how I would describe my insomnia. I described it as ‘my inner monologue is rushing’, the first thing that came to my mind in English. Plus I'm an actor, so I want to use the word monologue.” But the psychiatrist was concerned she was hearing voices and felt it wasn’t safe for her to leave. “The back and forth, glitching, misunderstanding, me getting progressively more nervous because I felt like I was more and more misunderstood, maybe led him to think that something else was going on,” she says. Novi was offered a sleeping pill to try, then she could go home with a prescription the next day. That wasn’t what happened.
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“I woke up and I was in a completely different building,” she says. “A psychiatric hospital for children, a youth ward.” Novi was 25, while the rest of the patients were between 12 and 16. It was Covid, the hospital was full, and they hadn’t known where else to place her. Plus the doctor who had committed her had left for spring break and couldn’t be reached. And the conditions of the ward meant she couldn’t make an outside phone call until the end of the first week, on the condition of good behaviour. Her husband didn’t know where she was, and she couldn’t contact him to ask for help.
It sounds like a nightmare scenario, but Novi made the best of it. Along with journaling, she hung out with her fellow inmates. “Even though the story is kind of heavy, these kids were so funny, so blunt, so honest,” she says. “They would say things to my face, like ‘you’re so old and weird, what’s wrong with you?’” She called upon her acting skills to make up games to play. “I tried to start having fun with them, because humor and laughter can be such a good way to stay sane.”
Still, being trapped without a phone and under constant observation was far worse than losing sleep over a drama showcase. “After a certain amount of time that you're in there, that's when you start to feel crazy,” says Novi. “Uncertainty can make you feel insane.” Thankfully, Novi was eventually able to contact her husband, and he began wrestling with the bureaucracy required to secure her release.
Novi feels she got extremely lucky. The young people she shared the ward with didn’t always have someone on the outside to advocate for them. Their situation also put her problems into perspective. “In a way, they were way more sane than the highly competitive drama school students. They were more lucid, they had perspective on what actually mattered.” It entirely reframed her fears around her end of year showcase and graduation. “It was like a bucket of ice water on my face,” she says.
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Initially, working on her diaries was purely therapeutic. But then it became her “compost” - the chance to turn “something shitty to something fertile”. Novi had never written a play before; her dreams had focused on acting alone. “I was trying to gain clarity on the whole situation,” she says. “It was the worst and also one of the best things that happened to me simultaneously. No version of me thought that I'd be in London three years later premiering the play. Or that I'd have had an off-Broadway run in New York with Michaela Coel and Jennifer Lawrence coming to see me act.”
While she may be a first time playwright, Novi knows how to create a buzz around her art. Her and her team’s DIY marketing plan for Invasive Species blows more traditional theatre promos out of the water. A lot of it centred around a single hot ticket piece of merch: a baseball cap with the show’s striking logo on it. You may have spotted Paul Mescal wearing it about town in London recently. Lawrence was also photographed sporting it in New York during the off-broadway run.
“We do know cool people. So how do we get cool people to wear the hat?”
“Listen, no one in this production is famous,” says Novi. “But we do know cool people. So how do we get cool people to wear the hat?” She worked with her husband and then a graphic designer to come up with the logo, which riffs on the oddly childish things such as Play-Doh and puzzles that Novi and the young people were given to entertain themselves with on the ward. “It had to feel hand crafty, [but also] like scratching into a wall, digging into something that's anxious, that's spiralling, that's a little manic.”
The squishy bubble letters in blaring red, stitched onto a cap, became the show’s calling card. They shot a marketing campaign on a shoestring budget of $200 and started posting it on Instagram (Novi also has a strong TikTok presence). Jeremy O. Harris, the creator of Slave Play (which also transferred from New York to London last year) is a friend of Novi’s from drama school and was deputised as its main cheerleader. “Suddenly, people who didn't even see the play or were necessarily interested in seeing the play, wanted the hat.”
@invasivespeciesplay What the hell? Invasive Species Sept 3 - Oct 3 @King’s Head Theatre #paulmescal #theatre #westend #fringe #standupcomedy @Paulmescalpics
♬ Where Is My Mind by Pixies SLOWED - avdloss
Along with generating hype around the show and drawing in an A-list audience, the campaign addressed another bugbear Novi has. “Marketing for theatre doesn't usually feel chic or elegant. There's so much work put into actually setting up a production, I wish the posters felt as artistic as the play.” It’s hard and expensive work, putting on a production, especially new works, and Novi is proud to be hosted by the “awesome” King’s Head Theatre, which champions queer theatre in its purpose-built space.
It’s a strangely serendipitous time for Invasive Species to land in London. As an Argentinian theatre-lover, Novi was delighted to be able to catch one of Rachel Zegler’s final performances in Evita while rehearsing the show. “My play has so many Evita themes,” she says. “I went with my director Michael [Breslin] and I got emotional because I’ve never seen such a large high budget spectacle that talks about Argentina.”
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Her work, as the name suggests, also digs into sticky issues around immigration, art and attempts at assimilation. An actor plays an anthropomorphised Acting Bug, complete with an insect costume, that bites her, torments her and even spits in her face. While the US is gripped by Donald Trump’s deportation fever, the UK is boiling over in violent anti-migrant protests promulgated by the far right.
But Novi doesn’t want to pretend her play offers any solutions. She has personally found London’s pubs and gay bars wonderful, its inhabitants friendly and approachable. Casting British actors who can bring their own experiences to the roles adds welcome texture, too. “It's a fine line between telling the truth about stuff that feels unfair and feels wrong, and also acknowledging one's privilege when it comes to like immigration in particular,” says Novi. While she may be an immigrant, she points out, she had the privileges of bilingualism, a visa, a place at an elite institution, and a passport that allows her to travel. The opportunity to assimilate, however hard it is.
“I struggle a lot with art that tries to spoon-feed you answers,” she says. “The play isn’t trying to teach you anything. If anything it’s a giant question mark, only one with really good sound design.”
Invasive Species at the King’s Head Theatre, until October 3, kingsheadtheatre.com
