Marina Keegan’s Musical ‘Independents’ Debuts at the New York International Fringe Festival

Marina Keegan


Yale graduate Marina Keegan had plans to change the world before her untimely death in a May car accident.


Keegan was a talented writer who co-wrote a musical that recently debuted in New York City. The musical “Independents” premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival.


The musical is “set in the current day aboard an 18th-century tall ship where a motley crew of people in their 20s have taken refuge from the pressures of beginning their adult lives. They survive economically by smuggling marijuana between Canada and the United States, but when the captain of their vessel disappears, they turn to historical re-enactments of events from the Revolutionary War to make ends meet,” The New York Times wrote.


Keegan, 22, died after her car overturned on Route 6 in Dennis, Mass. Keegan was pronounced dead after a vehicle driven by her boyfriend smashed into a guardrail and rolled over twice.


Keegan was involved on campus and served as president of the Yale College Democrats, the Yale Daily News reports. As a member of the College Democrats, she helped start Occupy Morgan Stanley, a protest group that challenged campus recruiting.


Her group once gathered outside an information session held by Morgan Stanley and chanted slogans like “Take a stance, don’t go into finance,” according to The New York Times.


Keegan planned to start her career as a writer for The New Yorker.


Keegan’s column “Another View: The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting” appeared in The New York Times’ The Deal Book. Keegan’s final Yale Daily News column “The Opposite of Loneliness” has gone viral since her untimely death.


In her viral column “The Opposite of Loneliness,” Keegan stressed to fellow classmates to cherish their youth.


“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time,” she said. “There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”


“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over,” she said. “Get a post-back or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”


Kevin Keegan, Marina’s father, told The New York Daily News, “she was a fantastic writer, just a wonderful human being who touched the lives of everyone she met.”


“I knew my daughter was talented,” Mr. Keegan said. “Now the world knows because of a tragedy.”

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