Jordan Wright
October 16, 2016
Special to The Alexandria Times
Kathleen Turner as Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking at Arena Stage at the Mead Cente . Photo by C. Stanley Photography.
Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking forms the basis of this one-woman monologue starring Oscar-winning film and stage star Kathleen Turner. The dramatic version of which first appeared on Broadway in 2007. Much has been written about Didion’s style of writing, both before her death and after. But whether favorable or not, she was considered one of the most important writer/journalist/essayists of her time. In a way she ushered in the “Me” generation with her self-absorbed, edgy style of writing. You either like her, or you don’t. Either way you slice it, she was an influential voice for decades.
The plot chronicle’s Didion’s personal journey while mourning the tragic loss of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne and tending to her ailing daughter, Quintana, who lies in a comatose state. From her early life in New York City as part of an elite group of writers (a 70’s version of the famed Algonquin Round Table), to her later life in fashionable Brentwood and Malibu enclaves, “I drove my Corvette down the PHC [Pacific Coast Highway for you non-Californians],” she quips, the conservative Republican author was eager to be regarded as a style-setter with the street cred of a bi-coastal, jet-setting journalist and wife of a successful Hollywood screenwriter.
Kathleen Turner as Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking at Arena Stage at the Mead Center. Photo by C. Stanley Photography.
In this drama the grieving Didion explores her mental breakdown during the most disastrous year of her life warning us repeatedly that, “This will happen to you,” as a way of explaining what can and will befall an ordinary life. With the discipline of a scholar, and naming the posh hospital she held vigil in, “Doctors Hospital, which became Beth Israel Medical Center, was right across from Gracie Mansion,” she proudly quips, she takes comfort in memorizing diagnoses and researching medical treatments and medications. Struggling to maintain her sanity, she micro-manages the doctors and nurses and chronologizes her daughter’s failing health. Some of it is humorous – though you can imagine feeling pity for the nurses she abuses – and some of it is superficial, as she namedrops her celebrity pals and notes her fondest memory of her daughter is her blond hair bleached by the California sun.
In her attempt to grapple with the day-to-day realities of planning her husband’s funeral and caring for her daughter, she seizes on primitive man’s anthropological concept of “magical thinking”. But notwithstanding her attempts at the spiritual, she soon learns that all of her maneuvering can’t protect her from the anguish and the debilitating vortex of despair.
Director Gaye Taylor Upchurch does a fine job of keeping the pace lively and Turner proves a more than capable candidate to channel Didion’s internal conflicts.
Through November 20th at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St., SE, Washington, DC 20024. For tickets and information call 202 488-3300 or visit www.ArenaStage.org.