Sage Theatre delves into grief
Play about loss and mourning finds ‘truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion’
Grief may be a universal emotion but how one handles grief can be entirely unique.
In 2003, novelist and screenwriter Joan Didion lost her husband and longtime writing partner John Gregory Dunne to a massive heart attack at their dinner table.
Just days before Dunne’s death, his and Didion’s adult daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, suffered a strain of pneumonia that quickly developed into septic shock, plunging her into a coma.
Quintana would die of complications two years after her father’s death.
Didion tried to process and come to terms with these dual tragedies as best she could and that meant putting her thoughts into a book which she called The Year of Magical Thinking.
The autobiographical analysis of her confused period of grief was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2005 and the play she wrote based on it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2007.
Sage Theatre is presenting Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in the Arts Commons Motel Theatre until Oct. 6 with Karen Johnson-Diamond inhabiting the role.
Inhabiting is the crucial word. Just minutes into the show, Johnson-Diamond disappears and becomes the embodiment of a grief-obsessed Didion. This is a remarkably honest performance of a remarkably honest analysis of what it was like for Didion to come to terms with her personal tragedies occurring so close to one another.
Didion defines magical thinking as the attempt to reverse a tragedy. Intellectual ly, she seems able to accept that her husband has died and that her daughter is barely hanging onto life. Emotionally, she can’t.
Didion explains that she was able to give her husband’s casual shirts, slacks and jackets away but not his suits and shoes because she thought he would want and need them when he returned home.
Her daughter was in a coma, but she was horrified to discover the television set in the room was left on. She admonished the staff, insisting she didn’t want her daughter to find out about her father’s death from the television.
Johnson-Diamond captures this dichotomy with subtle skill. Moments of clarity give way to flights of fantasy.
The play is essentially an 84-minute, stream-of-consciousness monologue that, in Johnson-Diamond’s first utterances, promises to be a straightforward recollection and analysis of a year of mourning. It is anything but linear. She begins to talk about an incident that happened after the death but it triggers a memory of a much earlier time.
We get to hear about Didion and Dunne bringing their daughter home from the hospital as an infant and we learn about their arguments over work and of vacations, weddings and hospital visits.
By the end of the play, we know so much about Didion’s life, which helps us realize why the deaths paralyzed her so completely.
It helps immensely that Didion is such an accomplished writer and Johnson-Diamond such an accomplished actor but, ultimately, it is the insights into grief that are funnelled by these two women that make the evening so powerful, memorable and uplifting.
Director Jason Mehmel allows Johnson-Diamond to float about the stage as if she is trying to find more secure footing. She talks to the audience as if we have dropped over to her home for a visit. The Motel is a small theatre and Mehmel allows Johnson-Diamond to wander into the aisles and constantly reference the three banks of seats.
Brad Leavitt’s set is simple but effective as is his lighting, helping to remind us this is a memory play.
What we get from Didion, Johnson-Diamond, Mehmel and Leavitt with The Year of Magical Thinking is what Tennessee Williams, in The Glass Menagerie, describes as “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
It’s a difficult subject treated with as much warmth as insight.