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THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
by Joan Didion, based on her memoir
October 14 – November 8, 2009
Stiemke Theater
  
More information about the play:
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary
instant. –Joan
Didion
Loss. Sudden and irrevocable loss will enter all of our lives at
one time or another. You can count on it. Loss of a job. Loss of
a home. Loss of property. These losses may change our circumstances
and weigh heavy on our hearts, but at some level these are really
just “things.” They are replaceable. As a community,
we can rally around, support and restore one another. But what about
losses of a different nature, ones more difficult to quantify, articulate
or even imagine? The loss of memory. The loss of a spouse. The – unthinkable – loss
of a child. How can we respond rationally to the unfathomable? Where
do we find strength amidst such grief?
Writer Joan Didion understands loss. On December 30, 2003, after
visiting her daughter, who lay comatose in the hospital with a lingering
pneumonia infection, Didion was making dinner when her husband died
of a sudden heart attack. Several months later, overwhelmed with
an experience that could only be understood from the inside, Didion
began typing notes to herself:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Didion continued journaling the breadth of her experiences, from
the overpowering waves of emotion, to regrets over her failures,
to peculiar feelings of hopefulness and strange acts of denial. (Didion
could not bring herself to throw away a certain pair of her husband’s
shoes, in the half-belief that he might need them. She was unprepared
to accept the change as final.) When the world as she knew it instantly
became unrecognizable to her, Didion searched for a way to make sense
of the enormous hole in her life. But what she discovered was that
it wasn’t necessary for everything to make sense. Sometimes
the best thing to do is to live for a while with “magical thinking,” a
kind of “craziness” that allows you to believe that what
just happened is still somehow open to revision, that life may just
return to normal:
When I wake and he still isn’t here
I try not to move.
I lie very still.
I analyze the situation.
Maybe it takes time for people to come back.
Maybe you have to wait.
It is this new way of thinking, this magical “if” that
allowed her to replace loss with a willingness to accept openness,
wonder and possibility. By the following December, Didion had written
an account of her response to her husband’s unexpected death.
Her wildly popular memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, received
a 2005 National Book Award. However, while Didion was in the middle
of her New York promotion of the book, the unthinkable occurred;
her daughter, Quintana, collapsed from a hematoma and died at the
age of 39.
Didion subsequently revised her book as a one-woman play, which
includes her responses to the deaths of both her husband and her
only child. Rep favorite Elizabeth Norment (THE NIGHT IS A CHILD,
WIT) will play Didion in our Stiemke Theater season opener, the role
Vanessa Redgrave portrayed on Broadway. Come gather with us in this
intimate space as we share her story and the mysterious relief of “magical
thinking.” Join us for a transformative, engaging and deeply
human exploration of all those irrational and unexplainable feelings
that come along with the experience of life, love and loss.
Kristin Crouch, Literary Director
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
By Joan Didion
PERFORMANCE INFORMATION
Previews: October 14 & 15
October 16 – November 8, 2009
Tickets: $25.00*
*Note: Due to new lower pricing in The Stiemke Theater, no other additional discounts apply.
CAST LIST
Elizabeth Norment
THE REP IN DEPTH
Join us for The Rep In Depth, our lively informative half-hour talk which starts 45 minutes before every performance in the Stiemke Theater.
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