When my mom passed away several years ago, which had to be one of my watershed life experiences, I sent out an email to my close friends all over the world to let them know, and I included this quote from Joan Didion’s autobiographical book about coping with the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the prolonged illness of their daughter, Quintana, “The Year of Magical Thinking”: “…when we mourn for our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” I think it’s a beautiful quote, so articulately and delicately crystallizing with a minimum of words that almost indescribable state of tremendous grief, that sense of losing huge chunks of one’s self and one’s past and future with the loss of the loved one. “The Year of Magical Thinking” is one of the most important and memorable books I’ve ever read in my life; I finished it a couple of months before my mom entered the hospital for her very rapid, and ultimately failed, battle with kidney ailments, and I couldn’t have realized how prescient the book would be for capturing my emotional responses to my own forthcoming loss. For Didion, in the book, powerfully, expressively, and relentlessly paints the various emotions that you go through when dealing with the loss of a loved one, and the terrifying possible loss of another – the anger, the discombobulation, the helplessness, the overwhelming pain, the sometimes gratuitous but always searing self-pity. So I was very excited and curious to see how Didion adapted the book, so emotionally frank, so introspective, into a theatrical piece, now being given its Chicago premiere by the Court Theatre. Although The Year of Magical Thinking, the play, is extremely well-written, and in the hands of Court Artistic Director Charlie Newell and actress Mary Beth Fisher, is masterfully, at times exquisitely, staged and performed, I missed some of the emotional clarity of the book. I felt that the play was indeed a portrayal of “magical thinking” versus “magical grieving and feeling” which the book so invaluably, and unapologetically, provided.
As BFF Debra and I discussed after the play, the key probably lies in how Didion herself differentiates the book from the play, which is included in the Play Notes: “When I was writing the book, I did not know whether or not I would survive. When I was writing the play, I knew I had survived.” The Year of Magical Thinking, the play, then, has a quality of restraint, of almost-clear-headedness that comes with somewhat being removed from the state of loss. I think the other difference is that when the play was written, Didion’s daughter, Quintana, had already passed away as well. So there is less of this uncertain terror at losing her, which is in the book, versus the qualities of remembrance and inevitability, which come out more in the play. The play is still quite moving in parts, such as when Didion, the character, says “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know about until we reach it…We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes”, some of the most gut-wrenching writing in the book which Didion gracefully brings over. It is also a very honest, self-aware play, in which Didion paints herself as difficult, questioning, and implacable, qualities that become more pronounced as she tries to come to terms with her grief.
And Fisher, in a tour-de-force performance, brilliantly portrays these qualities and some, navigating complicated emotions for eighty intermissionless minutes by herself, with just a table, a chair, a tea cup, an orchid plant, and a scarf as props to aid her in holding the audience enthralled. It is an impressive performance, but at times, it also feels like too much of a cerebral performance (again, possibly driven by the rhythms and emphases of the playwriting), lacking some of the emotional rawness and the heartbreaking empathy of the book’s Joan Didion. Fisher also seems to be a little too young to be the Didion who was 70 when Dunne passed away, and so I really don’t get a lot of that bitterness and confusion that happens when your life partner, who you have been with for a long time, is suddenly wrenched away from you (one of the great, complex paragraphs in the book which Didion doesn’t carry into the play talks about her self-realization that she has to see herself as others see her now, versus for the past forty years, when she saw herself in relation to how Dunne saw her when they first got married). Newell’s direction is unobtrusive, as it should be, since The Year of Magical Thinking is ultimately about the writing and the performance, but the staging can also use a little bit more intimacy and familiarity in my opinion (having Fisher on a relatively large, raised stage, and limiting the times she comes to the edge of it to address the audience, heightens the arms-length feel of the material).
The Year of Magical Thinking will definitely appeal to audiences who like sophisticated, intellectually demanding theater, so it is worth seeing from that perspective. For an honest, warm-blooded depiction of working through grief and pain, I would suggest you read the book first, or instead.
The Year of Magical Thinking is at the Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Avenue, in Hyde Park, until February 14.
Tags: Court Theatre
Recent Comments