The Year of Magical Thinking
Caught The Year of Magical Thinking last week, with the lovely Jeffrey Augustine Songco. I adore the book, and was struck by the way that everything that makes the book so captivating is exactly why the play doesn't work. For an autobiographical book on grief, it's a somewhat unemotional, analytical digestion of the actual process of losing and grieving. The emotional landscape is painted in the bare, isolated, harsh light that feels more authentic than almost anything I've ever read. If you haven't already, just read it.
Unfortunately, the unapologetic coldness of the book's tone makes the piece kind of DOA onstage. I remembered experiencing the book as this intimate sort of confession from Joan Didion to the reader, exposing herself to you from the safety of the pages. Onstage, that exposure became too much. It also didn't help that you could feel the Broadway summertime audience anticipating a weepy tour de force from Vanessa Redgrave, and the following boredom and confusion that set in when they were met with something more quiet and introspective. "Is this worth my $112 bucks?"
Spoiler alert: I did love one clearly dramaticized turn in the play: the reference to a gold bangle on Didion's wrist, which is later revealed as a posession of her deceased daughter. If the creators had used a few more dramatic devices like this, I think it would have made a lot of difference in getting the material to jump from the page into the fullness required in a theater.
All in all, I can't say The Year of Magical Thinking is an effective dramatic piece. However, sitting in row E, not more that 25 feet from Vanessa Redgrave, listening to Joan Didion's words, it was still hard not to be moved.
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5 comments:
LOVING the David H.P. balloon!
Thanks! I was photoshopping last night and reminescing about my middle school crush on Niles Crane.
mox I did not see The Year of Magical Thinking, but I did just read it. I am glad you liked it so much, and so did I. I did wonder though why Joan Didion wrote it - having one's world destroyed isn't what one would think could result in an important piece of writing. But I realized that Joan Didion is a WRITER, which means that her very being resides in the act of writing And so her only way of surviving the destruction of her world was to write about it. I don't think it makes sense to transfer it to the theater.
A further thought from your anoymous friend mox - a young man that I know, someone with a serious theater background (in dance) but now retired, told me that The Year of Magical Thinking is a record of Joan Didion's false world having been smashed by the deaths of her loved ones. When I read the book I was struck, as you were, by its authenticity. On the back of the book, though, there is a photograph of Didion,her husband, and her daughter (both soon to be dead), overlooking the ocean and with Didion evidently having a vodka or gin and tonic. Possibly this happy little scene is an image of success and fulfillment, the emphasis here being on IMAGE. Do you think there is anything to my ex-dancer's idea Mox, that a world of images, of pretense, was shattered by Mr. Death, and that this is the hidden theme of The Year of Magical Thinking?
Well, I suppose that any major loss is a destructive force in the lives it affects, especially for someone like Didion, who had existed literally beside her husband for their entire lives together. So I think it that while his death did call into question many things, I don't think that we can say from the info in the book wheather their lives were filled with falsity or pretense. From Didion's crushing self-awareness and sensitivity, I would suspect that the did not lead lives that we would judge as fake or image-obsessed.
I think Didion's reason for writing the book is because she is a writer, as you say, and this was her way of sorting out the experience. To articulate what she went through in her own artistic form seems to me to be her way of confronting the experience, and thus, understanding it.
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