What is more commonplace than the death of a spouse? “It will happen to you,” the “Joan” character says as the play starts. “The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” Maybe that’s one reason a work about such a depressing subject has become a runaway success. Didion’s book has sold 600,000 copies—more than any of her others—and the play is already sold out until June. Grief has inspired drama since the Greeks, but converting real personal tragedy into a vehicle for public consumption is a contemporary phenomenon. Calvin Trillin’s recent tribute to his late wife, “About Alice,” is also a best seller. Why? Besides the fact that both books are beautifully written, we’re a voyeuristic culture, and there’s nothing more voyeuristic than peeking inside someone else’s marriage. But unlike on TV talk shows, the raw emotions here are so genuine we can’t help but be deeply affected by watching these people grapple with them. For Didion, the death of her husband was so hard to grasp she came to believe he wasn’t really gone (that’s the “magical thinking”). She refused to pack his closet: “How could he come back,” she argued, “if he had no shoes?”
In bringing her best seller to the stage, Didion had to face another tragedy. Writing the book had helped her come to grips with her husband’s death—and writing the play became a way to deal with the loss of their daughter, Quintana, who died shortly after the book was finished. Her death “is at the heart of the play,” says Didion. “It was something I never entirely confronted before.” Given the enormity of the double loss, it’s amazing the play isn’t a total tearjerker. Didion, director David Hare and Redgrave manage to plant flashes of irony in the observations of the character Joan. The play unspools—and sometimes repeats and doubles back—like a long, intimate conversation, rather than the narrative style of the book. She aims the words right at the audience, making each of us her confidant. Joan is both rational and crazy—especially when she confesses, “I’m waiting for him to come back.” This is heartbreaking, but in its way also wry. When she views his body at the funeral home, she says wishfully: “He does not look as if he needs to be dead.” What gives the piece its special poignancy is Redgrave’s pitch-perfect performance. She modulates Joan beautifully—often she’s quite still, other times spirited—but she never overspends the big emotions.
Redgrave wears a wedding ring onstage and off (even though Didion does not). It’s a gold band Nero gave her in a small ceremony for family and friends on New Year’s Eve in England. The marriage, it turns out, isn’t official—“I think that’s a killer,” Redgrave says. “But we’re married—it’s as simple as that.” A month later, the actress celebrated her 70th birthday by beginning rehearsals for “Magical Thinking.” Hare calls the role “acting Olympics”—the challenge of appearing at once in control and a little insane, not to mention being alone onstage for 100 minutes. (And she’s had two hip replacements.) For all the stages Redgrave has commanded in her long and brilliant career, this role is a kind of triumphal culmination. “Everything I’ve undergone or been part of is here,” she says. “It’s about survival. And that’s my birthday present—this play.” May she have many more—roles, as well as birthdays.
