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ED RUBIN The Year of Magical Thinking
"The Year of Magical Thinking" Two years later The Year of Magical Thinking, adapted to the stage by Didion, directed by David Hare, and starring Vanessa Redgrave, opened on Broadway at the Booth Theatre to mixed reviews. The main complaint, which echoed mine, was that Redgrave never becomes the character, any character for that matter, but remained Redgrave delivering Didion’s words. Worse still, in going from page to stage, the book’s harrowing account of events – a heartbreaking confession of Didion’s deepest thoughts – now being addressed to an audience rather than being allowed to blossom in the mind of the reader, lost much of its intensity. What was a prayer on the page, to paraphrase one critic, was now a sermon on the stage. This was not so with A Classic Theatre’s production of Magical Thinking. From the very opening of play when actress Anne Kraft, comes downstage, front and center, and anxiously tells the audience with great insistence that "This happened on December 30, 2003. You might think that's awhile ago, but you won't when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. That’s what I am here to tell you," we just know that we are in for an emotional ride. Just how great of a ride we were to find out during the play’s 2 hours (one intermission) as we watched the actress’s body and soul, mind and heart, twist and turn, as she slowly morphs into Everywoman, if not Joan Didion herself. The story unfolds with the couple’s only daughter having fallen into septic shock from a runaway pneumonia infection. Both husband and wife have just returned home from visiting their daughter at New York's Beth Israel North hospital where she lay in an induced coma. While talking over dinner plans from kitchen to living room, Dunne, enjoying his second whisky, quietly slumps over in his chair. Though later declared dead from a massive heart attack, for a moment Didion mistook this event for a failed joke. "Stop kidding," she says. It is here that Kraft, speaking with ironic accuracy, and more than a dollop of skepticism – familiar Didion touches – introduces the audience to ‘magical thinking,’ the kind of thinking that will make Didion unable to throw out her husband’s shoes because he will need them when he returns. Though the play, if one can call it that, is not exactly great drama – it is not Long Day’s Journey into Night or Death of a Salesman – it does make for a deeply moving and beautifully written monologue, a highly literate one at that, of one woman’s journey, from the denial to the eventual acceptance of her husband’s and daughter’s death. It is also a tour de force that allows Kraft, a master at turning words into fully blown feelings and emotions, to show her acting chops. Channeling Didion’s panoply of continually changing faces, Kraft plays all the various chords of the playwright’s persona with great delicacy. We get the wise, bewildered, pained, compassionate, slightly hysterical, numb, all knowing, detached, loving, as well as the “cool, calm, and collected” Didion, as one ambulance attendant tells a concerned hospital doctor. Step by small step, detail by detail, the play builds
and a picture forms as Kraft feeds the audience a massive amount
of information that Didion has obsessively kept track of. With great
clarity she lists the physical circumstances surrounding her husband’s
death, and her daughter’s illness. We hear about the syringes
left by the paramedics who tried to revive him; the small spot of
blood on the rug where presumably he hit his head at one point;
the exact times that she called her doorman, dialed 911; the exact
minute of the ambulance’s arrival and departure, as well as
what every social worker and doctor at the hospital said. We also
hear the names of all the medications and medical procedures that
her husband and daughter received—the premise being that if
Didion can learn enough and is vigilant enough she will find a way
to bring back her husband and save her daughter.
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