Profound personal rumination on grief resonates during PTE’s The Year of Magical Thinking

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This article was published 11/04/2024 (883 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grief can make you crazy.

The death or dire illness of a loved one can plunge you into delusional thought patterns. Your mind keeps swirling back to the belief that you can — if you try hard enough and take the correct steps — bring the deceased back or protect the sick family member from dying.

We don’t talk about this form of insanity. But Joan Didion, the celebrated American journalist, essayist and author, documented her own case of it in her acclaimed 2005 memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking.

The book recounts Didion’s first year of survival after her husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, dropped dead of a heart attack at their dinner table in 2003. He was 71. At the time, the couple’s only child, Quintana, was a newlywed in her 30s, clinging to life in a hospital.

As the widowed writer continued to care for her daughter, she had the thought, “If I can keep her alive, John will come back.” It even occurred to her that she should attend Dunne’s autopsy because it might reveal something that could be fixed.

Didion adapted The Year of Magical Thinking into a one-woman play in 2007, adding new material to it. The monologue, running 90 minutes without intermission, opened Wednesday at Prairie Theatre Exchange. This review reflects the preview performance.

The set by Daina Leitold uses a few elements — a stylized fireplace, bookshelves, herringbone flooring and a chair — to evoke the Upper East Side Manhattan apartment where Didion and Dunne lived when they weren’t jetting to California or Paris or Hawaii.

As an obituary of Didion said in 2021, they were a “bicoastal glamour couple.” Thankfully, the memoir’s name-dropping and anecdotes rife with unacknowledged privilege are mostly absent from the stage version.

There’s a clear effort to have the grief story resonate broadly by having Dunne and Quintana serve as simpler spouse and child figures than they do in the memoir. Unfortunately, Dunne barely registers as a character. Quintana fares better in some achingly lovely passages.

Monique Marcker plays “Joan,” chic and reserved in a grey sweater-dress. “She’s a pretty cool customer,” a social worker said about Didion on the night of Dunne’s passing. The pale Marcker maintains that surface coolness and speaks crisply, echoing Didion’s prose style.

Director Rodrigo Beilfuss and Didion-as-writer succeed in creating the intimate impression that Joan is conversing directly with you as an audience member.

“It will happen to you,” she says about the derangement of grieving.

But the consistent tone, restrained gestures and narrow dynamic range of Marcker’s performance make this subdued, contemplative production less than theatrically compelling. She stays in an unvarying vocal range that’s extremely light and gentle — even soothing. At times it’s a strain to hear her.

Several times, what should be striking moments just slide by. For instance, Didion remembers Dunne saying on the way home from Quintana’s hospital bedside, shortly before he died, “I don’t think I’m up for this.”

Was he choosing to bow out, Didion wonders, and leave her alone to do the coping?

Didion’s script is not about emotion or the body. It’s not, for instance, about physically longing for her husband. Rather, it reveals her over-reliance on analytical thinking, insistence on arming herself with words and facts, and drive to manage and control.

She keeps using the word “definitely” in reassuring Quintana. She keeps recalling her husband asking her: “Must you always have the last word? Must you always be right?”

Although there are a few questionable tangents, the monologue is in many ways a beautiful, penetrating piece of writing. In tracing Didion’s particular story, it illuminates universal experiences, such as trying to avoid being pulled under by the riptide of memory. The recurring imagery of swimming is highly effective.

Ultimately, the writer arrives at a place where she can surrender to something other than thinking. Sharing what she has come to understand, she delivers an understated gift — something you can carry with you because, as she says, it will happen to you.