In December 2003, on the eve of New Year's Eve, Joan Didion had just finished building a fire and making her husband, John Gregory Dunne, a second drink when he suddenly stopped talking. They were both sitting at a table in their apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She was mixing a salad. He slumped over, left hand raised. She thought he was joking. "Pretending to be dead. You've seen people make that kind of tiresome joke," the character Joan Didion says a minute or two into The Year of Magical Thinking, the one-woman play by Didion based on her memoir of the same name. He wasn't joking. She initially thought he was choking. When she tried to lift him away from the chair so she could do the Heimlich maneuver, he fell onto the table and then onto the floor. "There was a dark liquid pooling beneath his face," she says. Paramedics, ambulance, traveling to the hospital—"I do not remember sirens"—everyone in scrubs, one man not in scrubs, the man not in scrubs telling her, "I'm your social worker." In the book, Didion writes, "I guess that is when I must have known." In the play, she adds a dark promise to the end of the thought: "If they give you a social worker, you're in trouble."

I wish I could review this show as a self-contained thing, outside of whatever I think of the book it's based on or the writer it's about, but that would be like reviewing WWII without talking about Germany. Didion is a near-magical force on the page, especially in the essays collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) and After Henry (1992). You look at the letters and you almost can't believe how packed with power they are, as if the ink is made out of gunpowder. The writer Charles D'Ambrosio has said he thinks of Didion as the contemporary Hemingway—her essays are literature on that level. (And her mannered, muscular—to use the word everyone always uses—sentences are symphonic descendants of his. His are alive with images; hers are alive with ideas.) Another writer I know, on the day the newspapers were dark with the news of Dunne's death, wandered through a park with me, both of us reeling with vicarious ache, trying to imagine our favorite writer's new loneliness. When The Year of Magical Thinking finally came out, we both read it almost pruriently—here were all the sordid, bloody, personal details about a traumatic event in the life of a personal hero.

The book is more scattered than most of Didion's nonfiction, still mannered but looser, still muscular but with many muscles not attached to anything—an indirect portrait of a scattering mind. The play Didion wrote later takes the book and scatters it further, remixes things, abridges things, and adds a new major event to the mix: As soon as the book was being published, while Didion was doing publicity for it, Didion and Dunne's only daughter, Quintana Roo, died—a string of freakish medical complications involving pneumonia, septic shock, a coma, and a massive hematoma. First her husband, then her daughter. Oh my fucking God was the collective feeling among people who were following the news. Plus, of course, awe. The memoir was justly rewarded with a National Book Award (a career first, incomprehensibly). One of the greatest American writers seemed both indomitable and standing at the edge of oblivion.

In order for a play about all of this to resonate as deeply as the material could, you would need to convey in a theatrical way some sense of who she is—her mannered writing, her muscular thinking, her towering place (despite her physical smallness) in American literature. All that this production offers is a set with four stacks of books in different places onstage. Doesn't really register. (It's a beautiful set, though, by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams—a few different clusters of furniture; a dock coming toward you in perspective that suggests Malibu, where she and Dunne were from and where they had a second home; an apron of white sand spilling out toward the audience.)

Without any sense of how her thinking/writing normally operate—logical, blistering, always contained in a tightly controlled mood—her scatteredness here just seems like standard-issue battiness. Like she's one of those people who can't hold a thought. This may be a fundamental problem with the material. If you read it, the play is as good as the memoir—but when you hear it aloud, it seems like it's written by someone who's never written a play (in addition to books, she'd only ever written movies). Nothing dramatic ever happens, except walking back and forth between pieces of furniture, and the elliptical, nonchronological narrative is almost impossible to follow.

And Judith Roberts's performance doesn't help matters: She just kind of (emphasis on kind of) acts out everything a given line describes, putting intense emphasis on seemingly random words. Every time she mentions the ICU—dozens of times, as Quintana was in and out of a lot of them—she spaces the pronunciation of each letter so far you almost feel like she's making a pun, saying "I... see... you," and it sounds goofier every time. She mentions in the course of some somber thought that her husband had a joke about something or other, and interrupts herself to halfheartedly pantomime the act of laughing, as if desperate to wring something to perform from the material. You're left with no sense of which details matter and which don't. You long for the director (Sarna Lapine) to figure out the dramatic contours of the monologue better and make them work as theater. Roberts clearly exhausted herself learning this hour-and-47-minute monologue. But now that she's onstage, she's given nothing to do. The overall effect is one of disengagement. It sounds like an old person rambling boringly about people you're never going to meet, serving up reflections you're never going to really get. You leave the show thinking Didion is a mediocre writer who'd like your pity. recommended