Jagged Little Pill Controversy: The Creators of ‘jagged Little Pill’ Respond to Criticism and Explain Major Alterations Made to A Transgender Character

By Nik Fret Last updated Sep 15, 2022

Producers of the Broadway revival of “Jagged Little Pill” have issued an apology in advance of the show’s reopening in October for their handling of a character’s gender identity.

The creators of Jagged Little Pill have issued an apology and detailed the procedures that will be taken before the show’s reopening on Broadway on October 21 for mishandling the character’s gender identity.

Producers Vivek J. Tiwary, Arvind Ethan David, and Eva Price released a lengthy statement on Friday (September 17) on the show’s website and social media, admitting mistakes in how they publicly spoke about and identified Jo, a lovestruck teen dealing with religious parents, their sexuality, and a deteriorating relationship, all while going through their own gender journey, the outcome of which is currently unknown.

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After apologizing to “those who have spoken up on this matter,” the message finally addressed the delays in publicly responding to complaints about the show’s language and Jo’s portrayal. The message says, “We owe you a response in both words and actions.” Sorry for the delay in these words as well as the time it took to implement the steps. Understanding the significance of the task at hand, we prioritized quality over speed.

As the musical traveled from Boston to Broadway, questions about Jo’s gender emerged, including whether they identified as non-binary, as another specific gender identity, or neither.

Lauren Patten, a cisgender woman, played Jo, however, the film Jagged Little Pill made it clear that Jo wasn’t a cisgender woman or man in a number of ways, including the character’s use of they/them pronouns and the invalidation of their identity by those around them. While the show itself never expressly identified Jo as non-binary, many viewers at the time applied that identification label to her.

To further complicate matters, by the time Jagged Little Pill made it to Broadway in 2019, audiences had already stopped talking about gender while seeing the piece. When asked about the program’s pronoun shift, Patten stated, “Jo never was written as anything other than cis,” in an interview with Vulture. It seems that marketing had also deleted mentions of gender identity as among the problems handled by the show.

The producers of Jagged Little Pill “set out to portray a character on a gender expansive journey without a known outcome,” according to the statement, but they made some mistakes during the transition from Boston to Broadway and in the way they handled the character’s development during “a process designed to clarify and streamline.”

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In an effort to cover up our error, we went public with our assertion that Jo was never intended for a non-binary audience. That totally disregarded the people’s reactions to this character’s development. It says “we should not have done it” in the statement. We should have had an honest conversation about the nuances and gender spectrum.

The team behind Jagged Little Pill apologized to the actors and fans for the “pain” they caused by their “failure and its consequences,” and then detailed the four ways in which they’ve changed the show to better reflect Jo.

It all begins with the declaration that Jo’s is “a story of a gender-nonconforming kid who is on an open-ended journey with relation to their queerness and gender identity.” It then says that the show’s producers “revisited” the script with the help of a new dramaturgical team that included non-binary, transgender, and BIPOC representation so that it could “commit to clarity and integrity in the telling of Jo’s tale.”