Intiman Tries to Kill Joan Didion

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.