On Dec. 30, 2003, noted writers Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had just returned home from Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, where their 37-year-old daughter Quintana lay in a coma. They performed their usual evening rituals and were having dinner, when Dunne suddenly raised one hand and hunched over. Didion thought he was making a bad joke. He was not.
Didion searched for a way to cope with her grief. She began to imagine/pretend that if she just took care of her ailing daughter and kept her safe, John would come back. Thus began what Didion called, "The Year of Magical Thinking," which she subsequently penned as a memoir. After it became a bestseller, she adapted it into a solo performance for the theater.
Vanessa Redgrave performed the piece on Broadway, while at Intiman Theatre, New York actress Judith Roberts assumes the role.
Unfortunately, Intiman's staged version of the play needs a little more magic. The work is cerebral rather than emotional and requires a great deal of focus on the part of the audience. The book is more compelling than the theater piece. Onstage, at least in this production, the performance lacks the intimacy the book brings to the reader.
Directed at the Intiman by Sarna Lapine, Roberts--via Didion's first-person narrative--steers us through the experience of losing two loved ones--her husband, and then months later, her daughter.
Didion observes herself avoiding grief through a thought process that bordered on insanity.
Her writing has always been known for being disquieting, detached and full of angst. With a touch of admiration, another writer once observed, "She ought to just tie her typewriter around her neck and jump out the window."
One-person shows are always challenging. If you're having an ADD moment, this isn't the play for you. This is a play to which you must listen closely. The actor must captivate the audience; the audience must care enough to pay attention. Some one-person shows are exhilarating and brilliant; others are tedious and plodding. This solo show falls somewhere in the middle, a literary reading more than a stage play.
Didion steps outside herself to observe her own life. The result? An intellectual piece with an underbelly of emotion. There are no sobs to punctuate the passages. Just words, precise details juxtaposed against indelible memories. It's an interesting perspective, but onstage it doesn't tug the heart strings.
Against a sea-and-sky background, Roberts stands on the dock, reciting Didion's words with a faltering stream of consciousness pace, rather like the actress Katherine Hepburn in her later years. There are many pauses supposedly to denote poignancy between words. Many. But Robert's pauses conveyed nothing to this critic, nor did her cadence.
When Didion describes her feelings and reactions in the book, an emotional bond is forged with the reader. But when Roberts repeats Didion's words on stage, that bond unravels. As devastating as her story is, onstage it isn't enough to hold your rapt attention for almost two hours without intermission.
Like a seasoned investigative reporter, Didion distances herself even from her own life, her tumultuous inner dialogue overridden by an outer objectivity. Emotion conveyed without demonstration. "I cried," she says at one point. But there are no tears displayed No body language to suggest despair. Just more words and lingering pauses.
Sometimes we find it easier to cry over a news story or the loss of a pet than to weep at the death of our loved ones. Instead, grief translates into numbness. So it can take months, even years, for the torrent of tears to follow. You suddenly see the back of someone's head and for a second you think it's your loved one. You hear a familiar expression and vocal tone. Unexpected events which trigger repressed memories.
In Greek tragedy, the Chorus conveys the catastrophe in a matter-of-fact manner. You never see it; you only hear about it in retrospect. In this tragedy, Didion is her own Chorus. The audience is asked to conjure the images from the chorus of her prose. A husband hunched over in death. A bedside vigil for a comatose daughter who would never again hear her father whisper, "I love you more than even one more day." And the magical thinking--shoes she couldn't give away because he would need them when he came back. What remains is the lesson. You cannot escape the grief that comes with death. "You think it can't happen to you," Didion, via Roberts, tells the audience. "But it will."
By chance, Didion's words echoed as this critic left the theater and was introduced to a woman whose daughter was stricken with the same condition--septic shock-the same that eventually killed Didion's daughter. The mother, who happens to be a nurse, shared her own story. In less than five minutes, she provided what I had longed for in Didion's stage narrative. Feelings.And the tears I could not shed inside the theater filled my eyes.
"The Year of Magical Thinking" runs Tuesday to Sunday through Sept. 20 at Intiman Theatre, tickets $10-$55, 206-269-1900. The talented Seattle actress Lori Larsen will perform the role on selected dates.[[In-content Ad]]
