Theater Review—

‘Magical,’ Powerful Work Being Done

In Westport

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Pictures on the table.

When the devastating loss of someone you love finally becomes an accepted fact, and the unbearable grief is transformed into something more manageable, Joan Didion explains, the dead become reduced to pictures on the table. The account of this process in her own life is the substance of Didion’s  powerful, harrowing, and supremely poetic elegy, The Year of Magical Thinking.

In 2004, after returning from the intensive care ward of a New York hospital, where their only child lay in a medically induced coma, suffering from toxic shock, Didion’s husband of 40 years, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, collapsed in the midst of a sentence, the victim of a fatal heart attack.

Giving meaning to the phrase “crazed with grief,” Didion spent the next year writing about how she engaged in a form of madness via Magical Thinking, a concept she learned about in college anthropology, wherein primitive tribes cope with what they most fear by practicing a form of hypothetical bargaining: 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 indulges in Magical Thinking, she can pretend that John is not really dead. This account became a memoir that won the National Book Award in 2005.

But fate threw Didion another wicked curve. Although her daughter, Quintana, recovered long enough to speak at her father’s memorial service, she quickly suffered another neurological crisis, this one a stroke causing massive intercranial bleeding. After that, even as her mother was working on  the book, the daughter’s life was a progression of recoveries, relapses, and ineffective treatments, ending with her death in the summer of 2005.

Three years later, at the instigation of theatrical producer Scott Rudin, Didion turned her memoir into this play, currently on stage at the Westport Country Playhouse, with Maureen Anderman in the role of Didion, speaking conversationally as she leans on an Adirondack chair outside a beach house, the sound of the Pacific surf roaring in the background.

This is what it is like to be mad. When you lose the person you love the most, it creates a dark void, an unending absence. For that first year Didion tells us how she dealt with it by using mental tricks, calling up memories to summon John’s presence, trawling the past for reassurances that he is still there — in their house in Malibu, that hotel in Paris, the Honolulu studio where they worked on bad movies together. Quintana too is remembered as a happy, loving child, learning to swim through a rip tide, playing tennis, hosting her first Thanksgiving as a married woman…

For the audience this 90-minute monologue provides a vision of a long, rich, happy marriage — the union of two successful writers supporting and encouraging each other, surrounded by exciting, creative, friends — between two people raising a perfect child who loved them and was happy.  But the memories become a trap, a vortex, sucking Didion into painful places where she dare not go because the past is too far away, and can never come back.

Gradually she loses the ability to pretend, and so the year of magical thinking must eventually come to an end. The dead are relegated to become fading pictures, reminders that the world was inalterably changed. Only then does acceptance of what seemed an intolerable loss become a less painful, more chronic form of grief, and so life can begin to go on.

Skillfully directed by Nicholas Martin, Maureen Anderman offers a powerful, riveting performance that left everyone in the theater deeply moved.  We all have those “pictures on the table” in our lives, and it is impossible to sit through this play without being stirred to remember.

(Performances wrap this weekend, with final shows the evenings of Thursday through Saturday, June 28-30, and the afternoon of Saturday, June 30.

Call 203-227-4177 or visit www.WestportPlayhouse.org for ticket and other details.)