Theater Review—

‘Magical Thinking’ Is Wise, Moving & Remarkable At TheaterWorks Hartford

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD — Knowing what it was about, I did not want to go see The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir in which she dealt with the death of her beloved husband of forty years, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, only to be sandbagged a year later by the medically inconclusive illness and death of their only child, Quintana.

But I went, and I’m so glad I did. Annalee Jeffries is remarkable in this 90-minute, one-woman dramatic monologue that continues its Connecticut premiere at TheatreWorks Hartford for a few more weeks. Her performance is so powerful and convincing that you forget it is acting, and that it is not really a gallant Ms Didion herself, come to share the truth with the audience that “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

The facts of the matter are starkly simple. Returning from a visit to a hospital intensive care ward where their daughter lay in an induced coma, suffering from septic shock, they were about to make dinner when, in the midst of a sentence, Dunne dropped dead from a massive heart attack.

Clutching the folder of information, she recites the record of how long it took the ambulance to get there, how much time the techs spent trying to revive him, what the hospital reports said, and so forth. She recalls how the one man in the ER not wearing blue scrubs introduced himself as her “social worker.”  His job was to tell her that her husband was dead, and to put her in a taxi, considerately asking if she had enough money for the fare.

“Magical Thinking,” Didion explains, is a concept from Anthropology class, a form of primitive bargaining wherein tribes forestall what they most fear by imagining a solution: If we sacrifice a virgin, the rain will come. If I don’t give away his shoes, he will come back and wear them again. If I collect all the facts, I can do what is necessary to make him recover. So long as she engages in Magical Thinking, she can pretend that he is not really dead.

Losing the person you love most creates a dark void – the unending absence – and for that first year she dealt with it by mental tricks, using memories to summon up his presence, trawling the past for reassurances that he is still there, in their old house in Malibu, in the hotel where they stayed in Paris.

For the audience, this affords a vision of a long, rich happy life, two successful writers, collaborating on movies as well as producing their own work, traveling the world, surrounded with exciting, creative friends, raising a strong, beautiful, happy daughter who was newly married and had hosted her first Thanksgiving dinner only a month earlier.

Only the memories become a trap, a vortex, sucking her into painful places where she dare not go, because the past is too far away, and can never come back.

While the book dealt only with 2004, the year following Mr Dunne’s death,  the play goes through the summer of the following year, as Quintana recovers, relapses, and ultimately succumbs in the ICU of the same hospital where her father died.

If there is a moral to this story it is that in the end, it is necessary to relinquish the dead, let them become the pictures on the table. Magical Thinking gives way to acceptance. From Anthropology, Ms Didion turns to the consolations of geology, and the sense of the timelessness and permanence of rocks.

The combination of Didion’s riveting prose, and the bravura performance of Annalee Jeffries, makes for a stunning theatrical experience. To be in the presence of someone else’s pain is harrowing, especially when the story is real. However, this TheaterWorks  Hartford production, directed by Steve Campo, is wise and moving and altogether remarkable.

(Performances continue until May 24. See the Enjoy calendar or visit TheaterWorksHartford.org for curtain details and other information.)