A semi-autobiographical dark comedy about an immigrant actor who winds up in a psychiatric ward, Maia Novi’s hit New York play has now arrived in London
The phrase sounded harmless enough: “Good morning guys, I’m gonna take you through my morning Goop routine.” Casually uttered by Gwyneth Paltrow in a YouTube beauty tutorial, it might seem like just another piece of wellness content. But for Maia Novi, an Argentine student at the Yale School of Drama, it landed differently. Her instructors had warned her that if she wanted a real shot at making it as an actress in the US, she’d have to “fix” her accent. Paltrow’s voice – crisp, polished, “full of money,” as Gatsby says of Daisy’s – became the model. “My teachers were like, Gwyneth Paltrow will be your way in,” Novi recalls. When she came across the Goop tutorial, something clicked. “I thought, oh my gosh, I have a way to enter the system, get a visa, stay in the country, and work. If this is the way, let’s go.”
Still, Novi’s initial excitement didn’t last. What began as a disciplined effort to master an accent soon spiralled into obsession, triggering a severe bout of insomnia. Desperate, she went to the campus health centre to ask for sleeping pills. But when she described her condition in the language of performance – referring to her racing thoughts as her “inner monologue” – the doctor misunderstood. Within hours, she was sedated and involuntarily committed to the youth psychiatric ward in New Haven. Inside, she began journalling to make sense of the chaos. One of the other young women in the ward offered a piece of advice that became a kind of prompt for these entries: “Wanna get out of here? You just gotta pretend to be normal.” “I was like, what is normal?” Novi says. “I used all my diary entries responding to that question. What does normal mean? What do I do with it?”
The answer is Invasive Species, a semi-autobiographical play that has since become a cult hit. Written by and starring Novi and directed by Michael Breslin, the work premiered at The Tank in New York in June 2023, before moving Off-Broadway to the Vineyard Theatre in May 2024. Now, it’s set to make its international debut with a five-week run at London’s King’s Head Theatre until October 3. Based on the diary entries Novi kept while hospitalised, the play follows a Hollywood-obsessed Argentine actress grappling with identity, assimilation and mental health. “There’s something really avant-garde, strange, and bizarre about this play – it feels more like a sculpture than a chronological narrative,” Novi says. Alternating between scenes of Novi’s hospitalisation and the disjointed, contradictory thoughts in her head, the work is a non-stop ride. “It’s 75 minutes of ‘pa-pa-pa-pa-pa’ – an explosion,” she says.
And yet, Invasive Species is often hilarious. Novi’s fellow patients in the youth psych ward – uncensored, quick-witted and bizarrely insightful – bring chaotic humour to the play. “They had no filter, which in a way felt more sane than the world I came from,” she says. “The drama school world, the adult world where everyone’s trying to fit in. We were locked up, but we were freer. I felt freer than I’ve ever felt in my life.” That sense of freedom runs through the play’s surreal landscape. There’s the Acting Bug, a human-sized insect who infects Novi with the need to perform, a Yale frat boy who crashes and burns on a disastrous date, and a clueless director who butchers an Eva Perón biopic. Each character is part satire, part psychological fragment. At the centre is Novi herself anchoring the chaos with wit, control and magnetism.
At its core, Invasive Species is about language – its power, its peril, and its potential. Novi’s story reveals a harsh truth: when you don’t use language the “right” way – when your accent is wrong, or your metaphors misfire – it can become dangerous. You risk being dismissed, misdiagnosed, silenced. But that runs counter to the work of the artist, whose job is to bend language, twist it, reimagine it. With Invasive Species, Novi takes that power back. She doesn’t just use language: she tears it apart, reshapes it, spits it out. She dares the audience to misunderstand her again. “I think there’s nothing worse in life than feeling misunderstood,” she says. “Ultimately, what we all want is to feel understood, to be heard, listened to, taken seriously, respected. Writing this was like healing a crack that had formed inside me from not having that.”
Invasive Species is playing at King’s Head Theatre in London until 3 October 2025.
