Joan Didion wrote a book, and then a play, about her experience over the course of a two year period when she lost her husband and daughter. It is a heart wrenching and passionately told story about one women surviving terrible loss. It was sad. It was moving. It was real, honest, and unapologetic. I liked it, while at the same time felt I was being talked down to by the author. It was a difficult juxtaposition of emotions, that ultimately left me feeling a bit unsatisfied walking out of the theatre. It took me a few months to come to the decision that my dissatisfaction had little to do with the play, so much as a handful of lines that open the show.
After the curtain rises on Didion, the only character in this one woman show, she posits to the audience that they could not possibly understand her grief. That the audience could not appreciate the magnitude of her loss, or comprehend what it meant to lose a loved one. That’s a fairly bold statement… and it was delivered by the actress with absolute and unflinching certainty… and it made me want to stand up and walk out of the theater.
As I sat there in the front row, listening to this handful of lines being delivered by the wonderfully talented actress playing Didion, I felt a growing sense of disdain, frustration, and contempt brewing inside me. To be blunt, the exact words that flitted through my mind were, “Honey, you don’t jack shit about me… or what I’ve been through…. what I’ve survived. Don’t tell me what I don’t know, or what I can’t understand… in fact… Fuck you!”
When you write lines like those, as a playwright, you know that you’re going to piss off someone in the audience. There is always going to being someone sitting in the audience who contradicts a simple generalization that applies for 99% of the population in attendance… it just so happens that I fell into the 1% chasm of no return.
The good news is that I am a playwright. I understood the gamble that Didion chose to take, and I respect her for it. You have to be prepared to make people uncomfortable, to make them cringe in their seats. Those five or six lines were meaningless to the vast majority of the audience. They were not meaningless to me.
I had to struggle to keep an open mind, and ultimately what got me back on track with the show was one of the lessons I’ve learned from my experience with death: No matter who you are, when death takes a loved one, you will remember that loss as the most difficult and painful experience you’ve ever had to endure. Through the lens of Joan Didion’s life experience, the death of her husband and daughter marked an unparalleled level of pain and grief. It has taken me a while to appreciate the truth of her statements, but perhaps not in the way she intended them… Just as Didion could never truly understand or appreciate the magnitude of MY experience, neither could I fully understand or appreciate HER loss. It took me a while to get past the opening lines of her play, but I decided to return to this production, and spend a few moments ruminating on it, because I’ve now read the book. After reading the book, I’ve decided that Didion’s play is worth further consideration.
One of the most intriguing devices used in this play resides in the title of the show. The notion of “Magical Thinking” is a device Didion employs to describe a mental state of denial following the death of her husband. Denial is one of the most difficult and horrendous steps in the grieving process that can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Didion’s version of denial involved the belief that if she didn’t get rid of her husbands belongings, or talk about him as though her were actually dead, or “move on” in any measurable way—eventually he would come back to her, come home, appear in their living room where he belonged.
It should be stated that the human experience, though vast and varied, is also limited. For many people the grieving process is very similar. (That is why counseling psychologists make good money helping people cope with loss in group therapy.) But it’s also true that each of us manifests our grief, our denial, our pain in very personal ways that relate to the person whom we have lost.
Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” looks at her process of coming to terms with the reality that her husband died of a heart attack one evening in their living room. Being a person who has been through the process of a dramatic and terrible loss in my life, numerous times now, it was interesting for me to sit in the audience and watch Didion describe her personal experience with loss. It wasn’t particularly revelatory for me, I’ve been there… but I was reminded of a quote from Lord Byron that goes:
“O Time! the beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter
And only healer when the heart hath bled!”- Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 130)
Byron’s lines sound much more romantic than, “Time heals all wounds.” The thing that worked for this show wasn’t the passage of time, but the active description of the events as they took place. Present tense description of emotions, actions, and events all swirling in a turbulent vortex of pain and loss that enveloped Didion’s character. At times this play felt like we in the audience were simply standing in the eye of the storm with Didion, watching a tornado of horrible events sweep by us in a crush of devastation. The show had fleeting moments of joy and remembrance that were welcome among all the grief. Though it became clear upon closer inspection that these moments were the pieces of Didion’s memory causing the break down, tearing her apart because they are in the past… they are lost. Didion’s present, active life in this play is a gem with facets of happiness and joy that is slowing shattering and falling apart. Beautiful in its destruction and deconstruction.
The lighting, costumes, and sound all came together to compliment the show very nicely. I had no real complaints on these components of the show. The work was professional and well executed.
Ultimately I was moved by this show. It had moments of brilliance that were, at times, tempered by mediocre blocking and so-so line delivery. I can’t say that I enjoyed the show, (because you can’t really enjoy 90 minutes of grief and suffering), but I did endure it and came out the other side the better for it. I also re-learned a valuable lesson from Didion’s play: Never be afraid to challenge your audience.