Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" on the Stage

May 26, 2006
Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion, Working on a Merger

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

SOON after the announcement was made last December that Joan Didion would be writing a one-woman play based on her autobiographical book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," Ms. Didion had a meeting with Scott Rudin, the Broadway producer who first proposed the idea, and David Hare, the British playwright who will be directing the production.

One of the topics was casting. It was not a long conversation.

Vanessa Redgrave, said Mr. Rudin, "was the only person we ever talked about. There was no one else ever discussed."

And so after a phone call to Ms. Redgrave, the two women, among the greatest practitioners of their crafts, started the process of becoming, in a sense, one.

"I said, 'My God,' and I couldn't speak for a long time," Ms. Redgrave, 69, recalled in an interview Wednesday afternoon in Ms. Didion's sunlight-filled apartment. "I'd read the book and given it to all my family."

"The Year of Magical Thinking" will be the first play for Ms. Didion, 71. It will not be a strict adaptation of the book, she said, because it will cover events that happened after it was published. The book, an account of the fear, despair and exasperation of bereavement, begins on Dec. 30, 2003, with the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, after a heart attack at the dinner table.

Ms. Didion had been married to Mr. Dunne for 39 years, during which they had been thriving literary partners, writing screenplays together, often adaptations of each other's novels. At the time of his death, their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was lying unconscious in the hospital after a bout of the flu turned into pneumonia and then septic shock.

After a series of abdominal infections, Ms. Michael died last August at 39. The book had already been finished.

Mr. Rudin, a friend of Ms. Didion's, approached her about writing a monologue play based on the book, which was published by Knopf in October and has since sold a half million copies. Mr. Hare, himself having written and acted in a monologue play, "Via Dolorosa," agreed to direct and offer advice while she was writing. (His first contact with Ms. Didion was writing her a fan letter after reading her 2001 collection of essays, "Political Fictions.")

The play is not opening until next spring ?- March 29 at the Booth on 45th Street ?- and has not yet been finished. Ms. Didion is writing and rewriting the script; she is on the 10th draft since the time her computer crashed, she said, and there were who knows how many before that.

Ms. Redgrave saw a first draft but did not participate in a workshop based on an early version this spring; she will not become part of the process until a final draft is finished sometime this summer. For now, neither she nor Ms. Didion wants to talk much about the work.

"I'm thinking about a lot of things in a lot of different ways," Ms. Redgrave said haltingly. "I don't like to put it into words."

Ms. Didion said, "It freezes it."

Though Ms. Redgrave will be playing someone who in all biographical aspects matches Joan Didion ?- "It's a character," Ms. Didion said, "as opposed to me speaking" ?- the two could hardly be mistaken for each other. Ms. Redgrave towers, and her movements are deliberate, dramatic; she speaks almost oratorically, throwing out Lear and Ibsen as if they were casual acquaintances. Even in a khaki-colored outfit on Ms. Didion's cream-colored sofa, she impresses herself on the room.

Ms. Didion, tiny, quiet and quick-speaking, keeps her hands mostly in her lap. One gets the feeling that the room is impressing itself on her.

But the play calls for an actress who can convincingly deliver Ms. Didion's words, not a mimic.

"She is the most emotionally expressive actor about a certain kind of extreme feeling," Mr. Hare said of Ms. Redgrave in a phone interview from London. "And one of Joan's extraordinary qualities is this glacially perfect prose which contains fantastic feeling underneath a formal surface."

The two women had met several times before, traveling the same social orbit. Their familiarity came about mainly through the director Tony Richardson, Ms. Redgrave's husband for five years in the 1960's and a close friend of Ms. Didion's and Mr. Dunne's until Mr. Richardson's death of complications from AIDS in 1991. He is still the common link.

"Everybody who knew Tony," Ms. Didion said, "returns to Tony."

Ms. Redgrave had been in this apartment twice before.

First in 1990, when her daughter, the actress Natasha Richardson, married the producer Robert Fox. The wedding took place "over there"; Ms. Didion gestured to another part of the living room. Afterward there was a lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant, where everyone was treated to an impromptu duet of "Edelweiss" by Ms. Redgrave and the actor Rupert Everett.

The next time was about a year later, around Christmas. "I can even date it, because afterward we walked over to see 'J.F.K.,' so whatever year that was," Ms. Didion said. (1991, for the record.)

And now.

But in the circles in which they move, everyone is familiar with everyone else, even if not all are well acquainted.

Mr. Rudin, who has known Ms. Didion for years, recently produced a movie, "Venus," featuring Ms. Redgrave; he is also opening another one of Mr. Hare's plays, "The Vertical Hour," at the Music Box in November. Mr. Hare directed Ms. Redgrave in 1985 in "Wetherby," which he also wrote.

The comfort of knowing one another is crucial in creating a play like this, in which personal grief and artistic detachment have to exist together. Not intruding on Ms. Didion's grief, Mr. Hare said, has been paramount in his mind as he works with her on the play.

Ms. Redgrave, first explaining that she is hesitant to talk about a work in progress, modified that slightly. Discussing Ibsen or O'Neill, she said, would be quite different.

"If you care very much about what somebody has written," she said, looking at her hands, "and it's a life, it lives, it's not like you talk about it like it's a book. I find it very difficult to talk about it because it's even closer to me now."

She looked over at Ms. Didion. "We don't know each other that well."

"But...," Ms. Didion said, smiling and not finishing the sentence.

New York Times