The bite of the acting bug: Maia Novi’s stinging play Invasive Species arrives in London

Getting caught in a web is not necessarily a bad thing.

The woven silk can become a safety blanket, a soft landing, embracing you, and intertwining you with people you didn’t know you needed to connect with.

In 2021, Maia Novi went to the hospital in New York in search of sleeping pills because the final year of drama school was getting to her. Next thing she knew, she woke up in a youth ward in a psychiatric hospital. She wasn’t allowed to make a phone call, and nobody knew where she was. During her 19-day stint, Novi kept a diary.

“Right after I got discharged, I assembled [the diary entries], mostly as a way to organise my thoughts of what happened and to process it,” she explains. It was her now-husband, and the dramaturg of her debut play Invasive Species, Amauta M Firmino, who saw the potential for something.

Then Michael Breslin, who had studied alongside Novi, came on board as director: “All of the ingredients came together so that it became this thing that was alive.”

What came next includes viral TikTok videos, celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence donning merch baseball caps, a hit Off-Broadway run, which saw Michaela Coel join the cast on stage, and a quick London transfer.

Since she was a little girl in Argentina, Novi had been bitten by the acting bug and dreamt of fame. Watching The Amazing Spider-Man cemented her desire to move to New York to study drama and become a star. Caught in her web now, by sheer coincidence, is actor Harrison Osterfield, who became BFFs with WhatsOnStage Award nominee and Spider-Man Tom Holland, while acting as his personal assistant during his time in the franchise.

Osterfield is joined on stage by Novi, Ella Blackburn, Max Percy and Kalifa Taylor in the multi-roling cast. “I like to think of the ensemble as a molecule, a beast of five heads,” the writer explains. 

Breslin elaborates how they portray a variety of characters, “including the children Maia encounters at the Psychiatric Board, her parents, the voices inside her head, a guy that she goes on a date with… all these different people. It really creates this world that swirls around Maia.”

“A lot of the play is about the conversations she has with herself and the voices in her head that all artists have about self-doubt or self-congratulations.”

Invasive Species is, in part, very meta. Novi, whose story stems from an obsession with success and being on the big screen, now feels a bigger, “more epic” thrill from being the main character of her own life on stage, playing it out night after night. “I wanted so hard to be seen, and I am being seen.”

Novi admits to making rewrites with this new cast in mind, saying: “I’m not the same person I was even a year ago.” In the piece, Osterfield plays a British film director. He uses his own accent, which is interesting to the playwright, who shares her own experiences of authoritative figures in America wanting her to sound American and forcing an accent. In one of the many savvy social media posts on the Invasive Species accounts, Novi says that she finds English the most difficult language to communicate her thoughts in.

It’s why the set design features black chairs and plays more with sight and sound, transporting audiences quickly and requiring imagination: “There are many mirrors around the play.”

“Not having the craziest Broadway budget in the world allowed all of us to build something that is sustained by the talent of the actors and the talent of the collaborators. It’s not hiding behind spectacles or masks or makeup,” Novi adds, “And I think we need more work that, driven by story and less about spectacle.”

Osterfield agrees, saying that: “Some of the subjects of this play are really delicate, and the exciting thing about it is that it feels like an open book where we’re sharing it with the audience.”

Since being so honest online, Novi has received hundreds of messages from people around the world relating to her experiences with mental health services. She says: “I think we’re definitely facing a mental health pandemic across the world, especially in young people.”

It’s informed her approach to using humour throughout the play. “It’s not too heavy,” Osterfield says, “The show has that kind of fringe personality and playfulness with a lot of energy across its 75 minutes. It’s like a blitz-crazy dream that you go through… It’s funny, but it’s heart-wrenching at the same time.”

“There’s a lightness which is a really fun thing to be a part of because it’s conversations that we all should be talking about, but it does it in a way that makes you feel involved. It’s a really special way of touching some of those subjects.”

Novi agrees that part of the brilliance is that the children and teens she met on the ward were “so extremely emotionally mature and funny.”

“I want to respect these young characters and take them seriously. These people became my friends. They weren’t just people I met. I became really close to them,” she confides. 

Amidst the often-star-studded, mostly-hilarious, always-candid Invasive Species social media posts, there is always the incentive for affordable tickets.

“For theatre to not become extinct, to preserve it, we need to bring people to the theatre that are not normally able to attend or pay $200 plus to go see a Broadway or a West End show… I feel a certain responsibility to do that,” Novi, who can often be found replying to comments with discount codes, explains. “It’s about making sure that people can come and see it, that young people can afford tickets, feel welcomed, and be a part of the theatre universe.”

The Invasive Species web wouldn’t have been cast without venues like the King’s Head Theatre in London taking a chance.

“How do you get a step forward when you’re asked to have a gigantic resume? How am I supposed to get a resume when I can’t even put the first foot in?” Novi asks, explaining that she got her break when The Tank, a non-profit in NYC said, “Listen, you don’t need to have a hundred credits, you don’t need to be this well-known, regarded playwright for us to open the doors to you.”

Invasive Species references everything from Goop to Caryl Churchill, and Breslin, who is behind underground hits Circle Jerk and The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, champions those bold, daring new works. “I saw someone who was just itching to do something that shook everything up in the theatre and wanted to really use her own life as source material, but also not stick so closely to it that it was constricting. She really wanted to have written a fabulous, really wild play that actually has a big heart at the centre of it.”

A fellow Yale graduate, Breslin connects with the piece himself: “Maia’s play is so honest and raw about how beautiful, healthy, useful ambition as a student can tip over into more monstrous ambition.”

He explains, “Once you reach a certain level, whether that’s in your education or your career or whatever, you want more, and that thirst and that hunger can be very healthy, but also have unintended consequences.”