THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING A play by Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking, adapted for the stage by Joan Didion, based on her memoir of the same title, is not a play. It is an hour and a half monologue as Didion, played by Vanessa Redgrave, reveals her innermost feelings and circumstances during a year when both her husband and daughter died. This monologue is now filling the seats at The Booth Theatre in New York with much deserved standing ovations for Redgrave.
"It will happen to you," Redgrave portraying Didion foreshadows in the opening lines, pointing into the audience. "That’s why I am here." The memory stops, the frame freezes, she proclaims.
The purpose of the play seems to be to reveal the grief, the stages one goes through in order to accept death and to be able to move on without loved ones. She is telling us her experiences so that we will be able to better understand what we will go through at some point in time. "You won’t believe it’s going to happen," she promises again and again. "Life changes in an instant, an ordinary instant."
"Primitive cultures live on magical thinking," she explains, and goes on to tell how she turned to magical thinking at each turn of death. Vividly, detail by detail, she delineates how her daughter relapsed into a protracted coma, followed by her husband’s unexpected death of heart failure, and finally by the demise of her daughter. She was there for both of them at the crucial moment. She heard the doctors, knew each one died, all that was quite clear. Yet at the same time she expected each to come back, and her magical thinking offered some kind of pleasure and hope.
At last she is able to accept. "We must relinquish the dead," she says, summoning the strength to endorse reality. "We must let them go…Let them become the photo on the wall…You have to go with the change."
The author’s message is not something most of us did not already know, though in facing similar personal circumstances we do realize that the journey is not easy, and perhaps it is worthwhile to be reminded of the veering of the course.
Vanessa Redgrave is brilliant in the role. Sitting in a chair in the center against a changing backdrop of artful freeform sunset-like streaks on a horizon, she dominates the bare stage and electrifies the audience into thoughtful compassion and compelling hunger for the lesson.
The set, the costume, the lighting, the entire production, directed by David Hare, could not have been more superb.
"It will happen to you," Redgrave portraying Didion foreshadows in the opening lines, pointing into the audience. "That’s why I am here." The memory stops, the frame freezes, she proclaims.
The purpose of the play seems to be to reveal the grief, the stages one goes through in order to accept death and to be able to move on without loved ones. She is telling us her experiences so that we will be able to better understand what we will go through at some point in time. "You won’t believe it’s going to happen," she promises again and again. "Life changes in an instant, an ordinary instant."
"Primitive cultures live on magical thinking," she explains, and goes on to tell how she turned to magical thinking at each turn of death. Vividly, detail by detail, she delineates how her daughter relapsed into a protracted coma, followed by her husband’s unexpected death of heart failure, and finally by the demise of her daughter. She was there for both of them at the crucial moment. She heard the doctors, knew each one died, all that was quite clear. Yet at the same time she expected each to come back, and her magical thinking offered some kind of pleasure and hope.
At last she is able to accept. "We must relinquish the dead," she says, summoning the strength to endorse reality. "We must let them go…Let them become the photo on the wall…You have to go with the change."
The author’s message is not something most of us did not already know, though in facing similar personal circumstances we do realize that the journey is not easy, and perhaps it is worthwhile to be reminded of the veering of the course.
Vanessa Redgrave is brilliant in the role. Sitting in a chair in the center against a changing backdrop of artful freeform sunset-like streaks on a horizon, she dominates the bare stage and electrifies the audience into thoughtful compassion and compelling hunger for the lesson.
The set, the costume, the lighting, the entire production, directed by David Hare, could not have been more superb.
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