CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Everyone seems to have a story about hearing Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” for the first time. The writer Diablo Cody was listening to the radio when a D.J. said, “This is going to be huge.” The composer Tom Kitt was in college, feeling like the whole world had stopped. I was a kid who got grounded for accidentally saying the F-word while singing along to “You Oughta Know.”

The album’s parade of fearlessly raw hits was as integral to ’90s pop culture as AOL promo disks and Doc Martens. Its success vindicated Ms. Morissette, who was previously rejected by radio stations saying they didn’t need another woman after Sinead O’Connor and Tori Amos. “For those in the patriarchy who thought women were not bankable,” she recalled in a recent interview, “that went out the window.”

Now Ms. Morissette’s trailblazing 1995 album is taking on new life: as theater. And don’t expect a fun, nostalgic jukebox musical about the ’90s. “Jagged Little Pill,” which opens at the American Repertory Theater here on May 24, is very much of the present and may just be the most woke musical since “Hair.”