Gould opens her heart and soul
The Year of Magical Thinking. A Play by Joan Didion based on her memoir. With Dorothy Ann Gould. Directed by Mark Graham Wilson. Production manager Patrick Curtis. Orielle Berry reviews
IT’S difficult to find the appropriate word to use for Dorothy Ann Gould’s performance in The Year of Magical Thinking.
Does one use the word mesmerising? Spellbinding? Magical? A tour de force? Exceptional?
Yes, all these words certainly describe this remarkable stage performance, but one wants a word that stands out from the rest.
Because although I have never seen a performance of The Year of Magical Thinking – and there have been several since its debut in 2007 – Gould’s outstanding performance will forever be my benchmark.
As a background to this moving and poignant memoir, acclaimed writer Didion for much of her career worked closely with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In 2003, he died, ending a partnership so richly intimate and close that she referred to the way in which he finished her sentences for her.
Didion chronicled her grief and response to his death and also the illness of her daughter Quintana in her memoir. Shortly after The Year of Magical Thinking was published, Quintana also died, after being in a coma, emerging from it, recovering and then declining again. Didion began turning the memoir into a play under the guidance of British playwright and director David Hare. It’s a open canvas as to the way each actress interprets it.
It opened in 2007 with Vanessa Redgrave starring in the debut at the Booth Theatre in New York. At the Baxter, for one hour and 40 minutes, Gould opens her heart and soul to the audience, she becomes and she is Didion. There are few stage accoutrements, no costume changes and barring some minimal musical interventions and a few screen projections to visually express what she is saying, she is alone with the audience.
They encircle her on three sides of the intimate stage, accentuating all the more her vulnerability – almost her nakedness.
She has nowhere to hide, yet she does not falter as she relates chronically why and how it was her year of magical thinking.
Faced with the unshakable finality of her husband’s death, Didion’s normally rational thought processes took a less than pragmatic turn. She kept his shoes, reasoning that he would need them when he returned.
Slowly she had to recognise that although she was going through the motions associated with the rituals of closure, she was actually longing to perform an impossible trick: to bring her husband back. So her year of magical thinking is her year spent wishing John back.
It’s a catharsis in which one grieves with this accomplished actress onstage, but there is a gentle and whimsical humour as she quietly observes the finer points, the magical moments of 40 years of marriage and, tenderly and sometimes in acute sorrow, the terrible loss as she relates her years of watching her daughter grow up, knowing she will never live out her years.
It’s a faultless performance; to engulf and grip an audience for this amount of time is no small feat and Gould seems to get it just right. Her mannerisms, the use of her hands, the volume of her voice are so well-thought out that it is a pleasure to observe.
Testimony to the triumph of Gould’s performance, there was a richly deserved standing ovation, but it was followed by many in the audience quietening down to reflect, as she deeply touched hearts and souls with her rendering of life’s inevitability.
At the Baxter Golden Arrow Studio until July 28