The Sound of One Heart Breaking
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: March 30, 2007
The substance is in the silences in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the arresting yet ultimately frustrating new drama starring Vanessa Redgrave that opened last night at the Booth Theater.
Vanessa Redgrave in "The Year of Magical Thinking."
This may seem surprising, given that the author is Joan Didion, who has adapted her extraordinary best-selling memoir about being blindsided by death. As a writer Ms. Didion has a peerless ear for the music of words in motion.
And this theatrical version of her account of losing her husband and her daughter within two years includes classic Didionesque sentences, as hard and translucent as hailstones. But it is in the quiet between the words, as she tastes and digests what she has said, that Ms. Redgrave — playing a character named Joan Didion — comes closest to capturing Ms. Didion’s voice and the delicate layering of harsh feelings that made the book such a stunner.
When I first read “Magical Thinking,” after experiencing the deaths of three people close to me in as many years, I felt I had been given an enchanted mirror, the kind in fairy tales that tells you the truth about yourself. (For the record I have a slight social acquaintance with Ms. Didion.)
Yet at the Booth Theater I never felt the magnetic pull that I experienced in reading the book. Though the script is by Ms. Didion, with many of its sentences lifted directly from the memoir, I never heard Ms. Didion’s voice when Ms. Redgrave was speaking.
That voice of course is one of the most insistently hypnotic in literature. Try reading Ms. Didion’s early novel “Play It As It Lays” in one sitting, and then try not thinking in the spare elliptical patterns of her prose. It’s impossible. The easiest choice in bringing “Year” to the stage would have been to ride the rhythms of that style: a controlled voice that, in keeping chaos and terror at bay, reminds us of their inescapable existence.
The stage version emphasizes the everywoman aspect of Ms. Didion’s personal anatomy of grief. Like the book, the play is shaped by the harrowing stories of the death in late 2003 of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and of the long, baffling illness of their daughter, Quintana, who died in the summer of 2005. (Her death, at 39, which occurred after Ms. Didion had completed her memoir, forms a new final chapter in the play.)
Ms. Redgrave, in a simple pale skirt and blouse, is an imposing, Cassandra-like creature, a prophetess at a temple of doom where we must all someday arrive.
Bob Crowley’s set (exquisitely accented by Jean Kalman’s lighting) is a series of painted drop curtains, suggesting a view of the desert by someone who has stared at the sun for too long.
Her first words would seem to confirm her oracular status: “This happened on Dec. 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you.” There is no equivalent to this admonition in the book. That’s because it isn’t necessary.
As Ms. Redgrave continues to slide through the narrator’s past and present — from the gray world of hospitals and funeral arrangements to a sunny shared familial past — she gives sharp life to a variety of moods: fury at medical incompetence and evasiveness, passionate maternal solicitude, conspiratorial feyness as she speaks of her belief that her dead husband will come back to her if only she performs the right actions.
Some moments — yes, silent ones — are remarkable. I have not, for example, been able to erase from my mind Ms. Redgrave’s face from an early scene. It’s after she, as Ms. Didion, has spoken of seeing her husband silent and slumped in a chair in their apartment at the end of a trying day. “I thought he was making a joke,” she says. “Slumping over. Pretending to be dead.”
Ms. Redgrave’s expression conveys two levels of consciousness: She is in the moment she has just described, irritated with what she perceives to be an ill-timed joke. And she is in the present tense — still angry with herself and the grotesque cosmic prank she has participated in — because her husband wasn’t joking at all.
In that small second or two Ms. Redgrave’s magnificent face, wry and wounded, is the reproachful emblem of the guilt and exasperation that the living so often feel toward the dying and the dead. There is also reflected that disorientation that comes from a death’s abrupt way of changing the rules by which you have always lived your life
Such moments erupt often enough throughout this production, which is directed with austere eloquence by the playwright David Hare, to raise the show well above the level of an audiotape. Students of acting are advised to buy tickets as close as possible to the stage to observe the presence and craft that allows one woman to hold an audience’s attention for 90 uninterrupted minutes.
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Related
The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic (March 4, 2007)
Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion, Working on a Merger (May 26, 2006)
'Year of Magical Thinking, The,' by Joan Didion: 'The Year of Magical Thinking': Goodbye to All That (October 9, 2005)
Featured Author: Joan Didion
But while my eyes never left Ms. Redgrave, I was also never free of a nagging dissatisfaction. I never felt I knew who this woman was. The big emotions register luminously. But do they connect with the portrait of someone who was described on the night of her husband’s death by a hospital social worker as “a pretty cool customer”? Much of what Ms. Didion depicts in her book is the state of self-preserving numbness that descends in crisis.
Ms. Redgrave doesn’t do numb. She never seems more naturally herself here than when she is quoting, radiantly, from the medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” As an artist she works on a heroic scale. Ms. Didion is a miniaturist, even when her subjects are vast.
And though many of the experiences and feelings described are universal, you cannot separate the impact of the book from Ms. Didion’s identity as a writer.
This is an early passage from the memoir: “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote was to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding what it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.”
The dynamic in the book arises from the tension between this impenetrable style and the emotions that war with it, that mock its elegant self-containment. That Ms. Didion never abandons those careful, chiseled sentences paradoxically leads us straight to the feelings beneath them.
When she describes, after a day of trying to keep herself composed and detached, finding to her surprise that she is crying, we know just how she feels. As readers we’ve been ambushed by a sorrow that was always there but that we were trying to deal with as dispassionately as the narrator.
That tension has not been translated to the stage. Ms. Redgrave sounds all the emotional notes in the play clearly and articulately in its first sequences, meaning there’s no further journey for her to take us on.
The consolation is that Vanessa Redgrave is Vanessa Redgrave, and she has her own means of plumbing depths. Watch, for example, the attention she gives to a bracelet on her arm, and how she develops it. It will break your heart.
There is no doubt that she is a great artist. So is Ms. Didion. The problem with “The Year of Magical Thinking” is that their artistry pulls in different directions.
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
By Joan Didion, based on her memoir; directed by David Hare; sets by Bob Crowley; costumes by Ann Roth; lighting by Jean Kalman; sound by Paul Arditti; production stage manager, Karen Armstrong; associate director, B T McNicholl. Presented by Scott Rudin, Roger Berlind, Debra Black, Daryl Roth and the Shubert Organization, Stuart Thompson and John Barlow, executive producers. At the Booth Theater, 222 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through Aug. 25. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
WITH: Vanessa Redgrave (Joan Didion).
