Joan Didion's monologue play, rooted in her 2005 memoir detailing the deaths in quick succession of her husband and daughter, succeeds at The Women's Theater Project in Fort Lauderdale with attentive tech and an achingly affective performance by Angie Radosh.
The Year of Magical Thinking is more than an autobiography by the widow of author John Gregory Dunne. It's a cautionary tale, an owner's manual for [people who have yet to know the grief, self-pity and self-doubt that attend sudden loss and insoluble medical mysteries. Didion's own situation was made either more bearable or more complicated by her descent into magical thinking, finding false conclusions in unrelated beliefs. (Dispose of Dunne's shoes? No, he'll need them when he returns.)
"And it will happen to you," Didion tells the audience at the start. "The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That's what I'm here to tell you."
Radosh hits all the notes in making Didion accessible even to non-devotees, for this is no impersonation. There's no effort to make Radosh look like the writer, who is in her 70s well older than the actress and has an iconic hair-and-sunglasses look. This is a person: unsentimental and frustrated, angry and remorseful, humorous in a way that isn't always self-deprecating.
Didion had been married to Dunne for almost 40 years when he collapsed and died of a heart attack as she was making a salad for dinner on December 30, 2003. Individually they wrote novels and magazine pieces. Together they wrote screenplays, starting with the 1971 movie, "The Panic in Needle Park," and including 1996's "Up Close & Personal." They had a daughter, Quintana, married five months at the time of her father's death. They had just come from visiting her in a hospital.
When Dunne dies a few hours later, we're told early on, Didion knows Quintana is not among the people she needs to call with the news: "Quintana is where we left her, unconscious in the ICU, the IV lines still dripping the medications." After a series of comebacks and setbacks, Quintana died in 2005, shortly after Didion's memoir, and her return from magical thinking, was complete, so the stage adaptation covers more than the memoir does.
For Didion, some details are vivid: the detritus paramedics left behind in the apartment, the hospital social worker referring to her as "a pretty cool customer," her husband's complaint that she always had to have the last word. When there are gaps in memory and information, Didion's long-honed reporting habits kick in. "Memory stops," Didion says. "The frame freezes. ... I warned you. I'm telling you what you need to know. You see me on this stage ... you know what happened to me. You don't want to think it could happen to you. That's why I'm here."
Genie Croft directs in two acts what could have been played on a bare stage as an intermissionless lecture, and tech aspects here are deft and work in several ways. Pre-curtain piano music mixes with the sound of waves lapping on a shore: We're meant to be in Malibu, where the family had a house. The stage is a rectangular platform it can be crossed in five steps or less -- with walls at the rear and one side. On the walls are faux family photos (by Women's Theater Project producer Meredith Lasher) horizontal seascapes, vertical cityscapes, a close-up of the author. When the house goes dark at the start of the play, the photos alone are illuminated. At the center of the stage is a small wooden table and an Adirondack chair. Draped across the chair is a sweater: It might be there only as a utilitarian measure in case the actress wants it against the chill of air conditioning, but it's also a silent echo of the sight that greeted Didion upon returning from the hospital Dunne's jacket left on a chair.
There's a curious lighting choice in the second act. At times the walls and stage are briefly awash in a textured brown and something approaching peach colors that call attention to themselves. That's not necessarily bad in this case: The effect,as the play nears its end, lets the eye reframe the image of Didion, placing her in part of a broader environment. Whatever the reason for the unusual color choice, Angie Radosh doesn't get lost in the mix; she's that good.
Joan Didion
