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by Joan Didion, directed by Michael Shamata

Belfry Theatre (Victoria), Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

November 9-December 12, 2010

The combination of an actor like Seana McKenna with a text by writer like Joan Didion ought to be unbeatable.  Yet, Didion’s one-woman play, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) based on her memoir from 2005 of the same name illustrates the difference between page and stage.  What works in the private one-to-one disclosure of the memoir does not work in the public forum of the theatre.  

Didion’s memoir recounts her experience of grief following the sudden death of her husband John in 2003.  Didion’s only child, her daughter Quintana, in and out of hospital from septic shock, died in 2005--an event covered in the play but not the memoir.  The self-portrait Didion paints is of an intellectual inured to clarity, rationality and mastery of expression who finds that her highly developed mental skills are utterly useless when confronting death.  She finds that grief causes her to revert to a more primitive or “magical” way of thinking, believing she can somehow control events by performing the proper rituals.  On one level she knows her husband is truly dead, yet on another she cannot throw out his shoes because doing so might prevent his coming back.  Thus, her penchant for pitiless self-analysis uncovers the madness of trying to control events that cannot be changed.  

This account of the loss of both a husband and a daughter ought to moving, but, strangely, it is not.  The character of Didion begins the play, unlike the memoir, by saying she has something to tell us that we need to know as if her experience will somehow help us deal with grief.  Yet, the play ends with the opposite view that people can never understand grief until it happens to them.  The play, unlike the memoir, has to use a mediator in the form of an actor.  One is conscious through all 90 minutes of McKenna’s formidable technique but never senses that she has fully become the character.  Director Michael Shamata tries to make the text more moving by having McKenna react to past tragic events as if they were happening in the present.  But that is contrary to the whole point of Didion’s text.  She has gone through mourning, has moved beyond it and tells her tale from that composed point of view.  In fact, Shamata and McKenna should increase the sense of restraint in the narration the better to suggest the depths of a madness kept at bay.  As it is, the current production will want to make you read the memoir if only to experience the power so dissipated in the theatre.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-11-10.

Photo: Seana McKenna.  ©David Cooper.