On December 30, 2003, Joan Didion lost her screenwriting partner and husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne. They’d just come home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo, who was lying unconscious in a Manhattan hospital ICU. Didion was making dinner and Dunne dropped dead of a coronary, just like that. If you already know the story, it’s probably because Didion made it the starting point for The Year of Magical Thinking, her best-selling memoir of coping with grief. Didion incorporated her daughter’s subsequent death into her stage version of the book, a 90-minute one-woman show that opened on Broadway in 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave (whose own daughter, Natasha Richardson, died this past March).
It’s obviously a gigantic chunk of memorization. I’m trying to get it word-perfect, because Joan Didion is so meticulous in how she constructs a sentence that a subtle shift of word can really impact the rhythm of a sentence, which impacts the emotional life that she’s creating. The text has these very interesting repetitions throughout, and they gain emotional momentum as they come up. They’re not just random. They’re building on each other. So it’s really important to get everything really accurate.
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She’s more instructive at the beginning: “This is what happened to me, so I know how this is going to go for you.” [But] after having discovered more about herself during the course of that 90 minutes, the cool instruction melts into a more universal embrace. She just extends herself more emotionally.
Did you discuss that with her?
She has a hardball quality with her subjects, and for her to be able to turn that on herself—it’s just really gutsy and it shows incredible intellect.
We’re all going to survive a death and we’re all going there ourselves. And we tend not to think about it in this culture. We tend to push death away, and I think it’s a really important conversation. It takes a lot of compassion to even open the conversation with a group of people in a room in a theater and say, “Let’s talk about this thing that happens to all of us. And let’s talk about how we think about it and what our beliefs are and why they are that way.” It’s a beautiful, beautiful, powerful conversation.
Previews 1/14-1/22; opens 1/23. Through 2/14: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $32-$56.
