The Year Of Magical Thinking
Antonio’s BLOW UP was the film that awakened once and for all my sense
of the genre. Having seen it in my early teens when it came out, I was struck
by its conflicting images of reality and illusion, sexuality and murder and
most of all by Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as she evoked for me a
sense of womanhood that I was yet to discover.
Watching her in THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, her angular form reminds me
of her in that early film role. Reciting Joan Didion’s memoir about the
loss of her husband and daughter within two years, Redgrave charts yet again
a course which for me remains unexplored. Still, she embodies this inner reality
as though she were a shyphen, sifting through memories, sorting out loss from
grief.
Neither dramatic nor monotone, subtle or overstated, Redgrave remains seated
for most of her 90 minutes on stage. This is after all, a memoir and her mission
is to tell it like it is. What she tells us is no less than the stuff of Greek
tragedy. In Redgrave’s hands this is never sentimental or nostalgic.
In fact, she delivers Didion’s trajectory during these years with grace
and humor.
As portrayed, MAGICAL THINKING is a detailed, brilliantly scripted document
of the author’s mental process as she is faced with one death and then
another. Often the most banal thoughts communicate the greatest sense of truth
as when watching over her daughter Quintana who’s on the edge of death,
she asks, “Have you ever wondered why the ICUs in New York hospitals
have such high-rent river views? Why you can watch the tide turn in the East
River from the ICUS at Cornell?” Didion calls on both Genesis and geology
in describing the shifting scene on the river, and the promise that they both
offer: “that the world will change but also continue”.
Simply costumed in Ann Roth’s flowing blue gray skirt, Redgrave mirrors
the colors in the sky. Bob Crowley’s backdrop reveals the shifting light
and in the end a single family photo in happier times.
But primarily, MAGICAL THINKING takes place in the theatre of the mind, a
barren, unadorned set.
That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.
