The Year of Magical Thinking
Written by Joan Didion
Directed by Brenda DeVita
American Players Theatre, Spring Green, WI (map)
thru Oct 4 | tickets: $44-$70 | more info
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Nobody likes to be talked down to
American Players Theatre presents
The Year of Magical Thinking
Review by Catey Sullivan
Lauded author and journalist Joan Didion is a master of spare, seismic elegance. The author of “Play it As it Lays” and “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” doesn’t traffic in adjectives, let alone hyperbole. The most life-changing and terrifying events, she notes in The Year of Magical Thinking unfold in an “ordinary instant.” One moment you are in the world you know, love and can navigate, if not with total ease and comforting familiarity. There are rarely fireworks or bold endings to signify the end of that world. “Tuesday, Sept. 11 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States,” she notes early in the book. When she interviewed survivors of Pearl Harbor, they recounted “just an ordinary, beautiful September day.” Until it wasn’t. The familiar world was obliterated in an instant, an ordinary instant.
In the one-woman adaptation of Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, the author’s unadorned prose lays bare a mind and heart under siege in memoir of grief, coping and the ordinary instants that uprooted her physically and emotionally.
Directed by Brenda DeVita and starring Sarah Day, it’s a piece that works better between the covers of Didion’s slim, original volume than it does on stage. The trouble isn’t with the understated, intensely potent narrative of cataclysm and a relatively stable, tranquil life sent into free-fall from the apex of a sheer cliff. Didion’s dialog has a laser-like focus and a high-definition vividness that stings.
But somewhere between the page and the stage, that text takes a turn for the didactic in the American Players Theatre production. Day is more schoolmarm than storyteller here. She’s not sharing so much as she’s schooling the audience, assuming a place of high authority as she gravely lets us know how she is going to enlighten us as to what we can expect when our own lives inevitably implode.
Day’s tone is that of someone who believes she has something unique and wise to convey, a gift of wisdom that she is now deigning to share with others. That surely wasn’t Didion’s intent in The Year of Magical Thinking – at least that’s not what comes across when one is reading the moving, gripping and unexpectedly funny book – but that’s the vibe filling the Touchstone Theatre for the duration of the piece. The second off-putting thing that is conveyed in Magical Thinking is a sense of entitled privilege. As Day recounts Quintana’s treatment and the cross-country flight chartered for the sole purpose of furthering that treatment, you may well find yourself wondering about the millions of people in similar circumstances who languish or die because they can’t afford or don’t have the connections to arrange for the absolute best treatment available.
DiVita has crafted an on-stage environment that deftly matches the minimalistic beauty of Didion’s memoir. The stage is essentially bare. Day is wearing an adornment-free gray pants suit. There’s nothing but the text and its delivery – when Day’s delivery veers into parental mode, the crystalline beauty of that text is all but wholly muted.
The piece recalls the events December 2003 and December, 2004, with flashbacks to Didion and Dunne as a power-couple whose literary prowess landed them movie deals and placed them at the intersecting heart of the country’s literary and Hollywood cognoscenti. Didion’s details her descent in to “magical thinking” as means of coping with overwhelming grief. She focuses on mundane tasks as a means of keeping the grief manageable, of resistance toward a sorrow that would render her “prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. “ “There was a level,” she says in the book, “on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.”
Of course nothing was reversible, and worse still, much of what Didion confronted was repetitive. Quintana’s illness and coma, Didion recounts, meant that she had to tell her daughter three times about her father’s death.
There’s sharp power in Didion’s memoir that takes the reader down a vortex of willed illusion, of mental illness as magical thinking and a means of coping with grief. That power is muted on stage, thanks to the subtle but evident lecturing tone embedded in Day’s delivery. Nobody likes to be talked down to, not even when the speaker is coming from a place of undeniable authority. But Day – intentionally or no – approaches her audience with the demeanor of someone who is going to tell you something for your own good. There are wonders within The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s a shame that this production makes their reception so difficult.
Rating: ★★
The Year of Magical Thinking continues through October 4th at American Players’ Touchstone Theatre, 5950 Golf Course Road, Spring Green, WI (map). Tickets are $44-$70, and are available by phone (608-588-2361) or online through their website (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at AmericanPlayers.org. (Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes, no intermission)
Photos by Zane Williams
artists
cast
Sarah Day
behind the scenes
Brenda DeVita (director), Robert Ramirez (text and voice coach), Holly Payne (costume design), Yu Shibagaki (scenic design), Noele Stollmack (lighting design), Victoria Deiorio (sound design and original music), Rebecca Lindsey (stage manager), Zane Williams (photos)
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