The Year Of Magical Thinking

The Year Of Magical Thinking, directed by Laurence Strangio, is a compelling but uneven monologue adapted by Joan Didion from her memoir of the same name. At the beginning, Jillian Murray drifts onto the set and introduces herself out-of-character, before she shifts into Didion and lays out the details of her husband's death and the medical issues of her comatose daughter, Quintana, who died shortly after the text’s completion. It is a strange and effective move, and one that establishes an atmosphere of unflinching truth-telling in its intense scrutiny of loss. However, the clarity of Didion’s writing presents its own unique issues which hamper the production. 

In the program for the play, Strangio writes about "how powerful it would be to hear someone telling this experience to an audience". Didion is, after all, one of the most influential voices of her generation. Her clear, sparse voice has a way of piercing people. Does it make for good theatre? The answer is a vague ‘kind of.’ The interplay between the mundane and the metaphysical in the book, which allows Didion to be so profound, occasionally feels jarring when spoken: at times, her words are dutifully and rather blandly recited, rather than performed. Murray is a master — it’s the kind of performance less experienced actors should attend and take notes on — showing finesse and command in the way emotion is withheld and released, but there’s only so much one can do with a text that is innately unsuited to the stage. The book itself is a prop in the performance, and at one point, Murray reads directly from it. The sequence illustrates the adaptation's lack of purpose: alongside the emotional blow of Didion’s grief, one wishes they were just reading the memoir. It doesn’t further the play’s cause that the sound design is a distraction most of the time; at its worst it features a persistent and irritating buzzing before the nadir of Didion’s grief hits. Overall, it feels like an intrusion into the minimalist piece.

Murray is a delight to watch, and there are moments that are harrowing in their rendition of Didion's devastation. Ultimately, while The Year of Magical Thinking occasionally comes close to the superb, it instead lands on the merely adequate.