Grieving is a solitary process. Faith and friends may rush to our side, but in the end, each individual has to forge a unique trail — find his or her way to grieve. For Joan Didion, the only character in Main Street Theater’s production adapted from Didion’s book about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, her path is control and, ironically, trying to persuade the audience that their experience will or maybe should mirror her own.
“This happened,” she says early in her monologue, “It will happen to you….I’m telling you what you need to know.”
Much of what she recounts in terms of pure data and facts are likely to elicit groaning amens of recognition: “When they give you a social worker,” she notes of the ER experience, “you’re in trouble.” Such comments, of course, are darkly funny, but then the humor is a tool helping control.
As played subtlety but brilliantly by Pamela Vogel, Didion recounts her experiences and emotions but most vitally, she dissects herself — the magical thinking that takes her beyond her usual professional tricks and seeks to hold together a life that seems to spin apart like trash in a tornado: “I knew,” she tells us, “but refused to know.” No where is this clearer than when her story follows the death of her husband, with her daughter’s fall into a series of medical traumas — a vortex that is both her daughter’s medical experience and her own behavior and tics. “Am I going to make it,” she quotes her daughter. But in her response — “Definitely” — she knows “I still could not keep her safe.”
A practitioner of the New Journalism trumpeted by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, that blends the personal and the objective, the minutely real with mental intuition, Didion is a master at telling minutia that reinforces her realism even when it is not particularly clear to the audience. One would need a detailed map knowledge of New York and LA as well as a scorecard of all Didion’s relations and friends to catch every detail. But the catching is not the issue. It’s the coping with the minutia that matters.
Director Rebecca Green Udden appropriately keeps the production simple: an abstract backdrop of silver and gold squares, a writing desk, a reading chair. She gives Didion a tight circle to move in, to pace, to fill with her determination and her anguish. And she uses simple musical transitions to mark movements in time — clear but unobtrusive. Most importantly, she guides Vogel to give a powerfully understated performance: the artist trying to write her unmasked life.
This is not an easy play to watch, but it is one that every audience who was struggled with grief will understand, perhaps want, at times, to correct in the name of help. But as Didion is corralled in the events of her grief, we are locked away from her by the floodlights — as strict and inflexible a division as the one between the living and the dead.
This production seems to be hoping to achieve some kind of bonding between audience and Didion’s avatar, but that happening will depend on each viewer’s own thoughts and experiences with grief. Nevertheless, it relentlessly touches those live nerves, and from Didion’s grief shapes intense moments of miraculous communication.
“The Year of Magical Thinking” is on stage at Houston’s Main Street Theatre through Nov. 17.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.
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