THEATRE REVIEW: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
12 Nov'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

TORONTO - To Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's celebrated five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance -- essayist/novelist/screenwriter Joan Didion has added a sixth. And that would be playwrighting.

In working her way through the aftermath of the death of her husband of more than 40 years, John Gregory Dunne -- coincidental with the life-threatening illness of their only child, daughter Quintana -- Didion authored a book titled THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING. Then, when Quintana died -- shortly after the publication of the book -- Didion addressed the new tragedy in her life, not by adding new chapters to the book, but rather by adapting it into a stage play that incorporated her beloved daughter's death into her deeply moving narrative of loss. The result is a compelling one woman show that premiered to all-but universal acclaim on Broadway, in a production starring the legendary Vanessa Redgrave.

And now, not surprisingly, it has made its way to Canada and more specifically the Toronto stage, where it opened at the Tarragon Theatre Tuesday, a Tarragon presentation of Victoria's Belfry Theatre production. Starring Seana McKenna as Didion, under the direction of Michael Shamata, this is a production that most certainly showcases Didion the writer in the best possible light, underlining as it does, at every turn, the beautifully etched and almost sculptural underpinnings of her dramatic construction.

Without a single word wasted, and eschewing sentimentality at every turn, she builds her tragic story, layer by layer, overlaying detail upon detail until it becomes a vital skin that not only encompasses the whole, but contains it as well. In the same way as she has dissected politics and people throughout her celebrated career, Didion unflinchingly examines what happened when the two people who most shaped, defined and anchored her life, suddenly, and seemingly without warning, simply up and left it. Though she acknowledges Donne's ongoing struggle with heart disease and her daughter's ongoing struggle with an infection that grew out of a bout of pneumonia, she underscores from the get-go that none of us are ever prepared for death and what it does to the living it leaves behind. She makes it a journey through hell to small but precious wisdom.

Working on a set of smoke and mirrors -- or at least smoked glass and mirrors -- by John Ferguson, superbly lit as part hospital, part madhouse by Michael Walton, McKenna turns in a finely crafted performance that, under Shamata's watchful eye, also eschews sentimentality at every turn. So determined are they to honour the spirit of Didion's powerful work, in fact, that they not only avoid sentimentality, but for the most part stomp out sentiment itself. And that overzealousness comes with a high price tag.

Despite the care and craft she brings to her performance, McKenna's Didion is less a reflection of an eclectic West Coast/military childhood and a peripatetic life as a writer; instead it seems to have sprung fully formed from the loins of a long line of hide-bound New England Puritans. Coupled as it is with a classical actor's precise speech patterns, here anchored firmly somewhere in the mid-Atlantic and untouched by Didion's self-described "Okie" cadences, her iciness gives us not a woman who has endured the fires of great grief and emerged cleansed, but rather a woman who has frozen herself so entirely that those fires can't touch her and in consequence, we are not touched by her grief.

Where Didion's story suggests a character that has faced down that grief and made it a part of her daily life, McKenna gives us a character that seems largely unscathed by it.