“Magical Thinking” Is The Real Deal

“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” In the first lines of The Year of Magical Thinking — currently staged by Long Wharf Theatre at various locations in and near New Haven through Dec. 10 — the lone actor on stage establishes herself. She’s a reporter, drawing power from facts. Her voice matches the unblinking eye and mind implicit in her words. But that voice, with its mix of sharpness and vulnerability, also flags what’s ahead: that the coming waves of shock and grief will tip over some facts, wash away some logic. If facts and logic have been your guiding lights, how do you navigate the next days, months, years, without them? And where are you at the end of it? 

The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play written by celebrated journalist and novelist Joan Didion based largely on her book by the same name, is a document of profound loss. It deals with Didion’s experiences of the sudden death of her husband in 2003 at the age of 71 and the long sickness and death of their daughter Quintana Roo in 2005 at the age of 39. Didion (who died in 2021 at the age of 87) gives us her memories of her family’s deaths in unflinching terms, with wrenching and disarming honesty. But more important — in an intellectual and emotional feat that has, in hindsight, made The Year of Magical Thinking the crown of Didion’s storied career — Didion, one of the keenest eyes and sharpest minds in journalism, turns those skills of observation and analysis on herself. She chronicles, investigates, and interrogates her own grief, and the process, questions damn near everything else. 

In short, it’s not an easy ride. But in actor Kathleen Chalfant’s hands (playing Didion), and thanks to sensitive, attuned direction from Jonathan Silverstein, it is a mesmerizing one, all the more so for the way everything else has been stripped to the bone. The set is simple: a straight-backed chair flanked by end tables, a stack of books, and two lamps. Chalfant walks in unannounced, sits down, and begins speaking. She doesn’t get up again for 90 minutes. With Didion’s language and Chalfant’s thoroughly lived-in, empathetic performance, this is more than enough.

Perhaps most surprising, given the subject matter, is that The Year of Magical Thinking is shot through with flashes of dark, wry humor that leaven the harrowing emotions and hone the edge of the piece’s intellectual investigation. This humor pops up everywhere, starting with Didion’s depictions of herself at the hospital shortly after Dunne’s death (such as her aside that you know you’re in trouble when the hospital assigns you a social worker) and proceeding with her explanations of the thoughts and behaviors that grief wrought in her, the ways they made her crazy. Visiting Los Angeles, where she lived for decades with her family, her desire to avoid places that will trigger unbearable memories lead her to follow some very convoluted road maps. In an especially riveting passage — equal parts absurd, uncomfortable, and heartbreaking — she details how she contemplated being present for her husband’s autopsy, even knowing the details of what that would entail. In the magical logic of her grief, she relates, part of her believed that in the examination the doctors might find out exactly what had killed him, which meant maybe they could bring him back.

Chalfant leans hard into Didion’s frequent penchant for self-criticism, so that we find her utterly sympathetic even as she revisits her own flaws. But those expecting a story about how a hard-bitten realist finds faith through tragedy will be disappointed. Instead, she finds healing through memory and time. She learns, at last, to let go. She revisits a memory of swimming with her husband in the surf off the coast of California, and figuring out how to ride a wave into a sea cave among the rocks. ​“You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow, but he did tell me that.”

In Long Wharf’s production, the play is amplified by its scale. When The Year of Magical Thinking opened on Broadway in 2007, it starred Vanessa Redgrave, who performed it in a nearly 800-seat theatre. Long Wharf, by contrast, has been staging it mostly in people’s living rooms; this reporter saw it with a small audience at Bregamos Community Theatre, the chairs set up close to the stage. Having seen it in such an intimate setting, it’s difficult to conceive of it being nearly as effective with anything larger. The proximity of the audience allows Chalfant to dial down her own performance, to speak at a normal, conversational level, in use subtleties of voice and gesture that would be lost in a larger space, where the audience was farther away. This naturalistic approach serves the play utterly. It allows the audience to feel some of Didion’s grief on an individual level, and in the process, connect that much more with her hard-earned wisdom.

Long Wharf Theatre’s production of The Year of Magical Thinking runs through Dec. 10; as of this writing, the run is sold out, but a waitlist is available.