What lies at the heart of “The Year of Magical Thinking” is our coldest earthbound reality.
You might think that would be death, and it is. But not one’s own. The eloquent one-woman show at Intiman Theatre shows how the real challenge is to the survivor left behind.
Adapted by Joan Didion from her memoir of the same name, it documents her rough wake after the sudden death by a heart attack of her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne. The couple, renowned screenwriting partners as well, had just come home from the hospital where their adult daughter lay in a coma.
“This will be you,” intones Judith Roberts as the writer, passing on her own discovery. And she is baffled by the “ordinary instant” in which a life can change. Their daughter, Quintana Roo, had been felled by a wintertime flu that mysteriously exploded into septic shock that left her unconscious in intensive care. Dunne’s sudden death was a one-two punch that left her numb.
Didion’s façade was one of control, dutifully “making arrangements.” But behind it was a primitive “magical thinking” that supported denial. As long as she did what was expected – calling the priest, setting up the funeral, giving away his clothes – her husband would come back to fulfill a secret, cosmic practical joke.
Like pulling loose jacket threads, new rituals emerge, and Roberts as Didion describes her compulsion to avoid driving familiar streets that had significance, to stay away from her Malibu home to preserve the daft notion that John and a young Quintana are playing there still.
Roberts’ crisp annunciation projects the fragility of porcelain, but with an inner rod of deliberate steel. She mirrors Didion’s spare, deliberate writing style with plainspoken declarations of fact. She notes the abandoned syringes and electrodes the paramedics left behind, and the puddle of her husband’s blood that greets her return home, with a journalist’s precision.
She reports, too, the slow seeming recovery of their daughter, the stress and uncertainty of which adds to her gingerly followed rites. To no avail; Quintana was struck by a massive hematoma and died just as Didion’s book was going to press. The play has been expanded to include those late events.
What has made Didion such an admired writer is her observant tone, dispassionate and true, yet with an outsider’s reserve. She applies the same here, an observer of her own behavior and inner thoughts.
That makes some troubled transition to the stage. An actor must be more than reporter, and numbness is a collision of emotions, not the absence of them. Didion is clearly unnerved by her need for the delusions that help her to function.
Roberts had not fully recovered from the illness that delayed the show’s opening by a week (she had to pause to deal with a cough), so it’s hard to fairly evaluate her performance. But the steady metronome pace set by director Sarna Lapine makes the evening seem more like reading than a performance.
(The role will be played by an alternate performer, local actor Lori Larsen, on select nights.)
Mild derangement, we learn, is a necessary part of grief, and the way Didion marvels at her own descent betrays her as a committed rationalist. Such reflexive defenses would surprise neither the deeply spiritual nor the true humanist that accepts the shamanistic impulse.
The last several decades of recovery psychobabble have turned the label “survivor” into an absurd badge of honor. What Didion’s work reminds us is the harsh truth that surviving more often really mean being the only one still standing, guiltless, bereft and grasping for support.
“The Year of Magical Thinking” runs at Intiman Theatre at Seattle Center through Sept. 20. Tickets: $40-$55, $10 for patrons under 25. 206-269-1900 or www.intiman.org.
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