A Stage Play of Magical Thinking: Didion on Broadway

Today’s New York Times Art & Leisure section contains a piece by Joan Didion. Scientists could probably use me as a study in magnetism whenever I pick up a periodical and discover a new essay by Didion; she’s just that powerful.

Readers of Didion’s most recent work, the National Book Award-winning memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, know that Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died unexpectedly from a heart attack on December 30, 2003. The couple had just returned from a local hospital where their only daughter, Quintana, lay comatose with septic shock. Didion’s book tells the story of her life in the year following her husband’s death and during the course of her daughter’s illness. As the manuscript went to press, Quintana died, leaving Didion alone for the first time in 40 years.

Didion has since transformed her book into a one-woman Broadway show, which is about to begin previews. Vanessa Redgrave stars as Didion. The director is British dramatist David Hare. She explains in the Times:

I have no clear memory of when the notion of making a play took hold, but it was sometime in October 2005. My daughter had died in August, and my sense of the season that followed remains what she would have called, at a point when she was recovering from brain surgery, “mudgy.” Early that October, when Scott Rudin asked if I would consider doing “The Year of Magical Thinking” as a play, I was negative, even vehemently so. I had devised a narrow track on which to get through the fall. The book, an account of the year that followed the death of my husband, was just published. I had promotion ahead, flights, 5 a.m. pickups, Starbucks cappuccino at the gate in lieu of breakfast, Boston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Toronto, check in, check out, stay on track. I did not want to write a play. I had never wanted to write a play. I did not know how to write a play.

I repeated this.

I repeated it to Scott, and I repeated it to myself.

Yet at some point in the days that followed I was seized by the idea that the fact that I had never written and did not know how to write a play could be the point, the imperative, the very reason to write one. My husband had died, our only child had died, I was no longer exactly the person I had been.

It was necessary to try something new.

Something the person I had been would not have tried.

Didion goes on to say that the play is not a mere adaptation of her memoir. The play will, in fact, go deeper and reveal what Didion did not know at the time the book was written. It is, in essence, a continuation of the book.

Read the whole essay here. For those of you lucky enough to be near New York City, ticket information is here.