Bregamos Community Theater | Culture & Community | Fair Haven | Long Wharf Theatre | Arts & Culture
We begin looking at an empty chair, a few books piled around it and two soft lights on either side. Without fanfare, Kathleen Chalfant takes the stage holding a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The lights stay up on the audience as Chalfant leans in with familiarity. She states: “This will happen to you.”
So begins a 90 minute, intimate exploration of death, memory, and the bargains we make with our own grief. The Year of Magical Thinking, written by Joan Didion, conceived and directed by Jonathan Silverstein and presented by Long Wharf Theatre in partnership with Keen Company runs now until December 10. It will appear at several different venues, some extremely intimate, across New Haven during that time.
Tickets and more information are available here.
Didion’s book, from which this production is adapted, recounts the year following her husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death in 2003. It was first published by Knopf in October 2005, was a finalist for a 2006 Pulitzer Prize, and was widely lauded for its wry yet moving prose. It was first adapted for the stage in 2007.
While a one-person show with little production value about grief may not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, this adaptation and Chalfant’s performance in particular may change your mind.
Chalfant-as-Didion begins her story on the night of her husband’s death. She speaks candidly to the audience about the moment of finding her husband's body, having spoken to him minutes before. She speaks of emergency services, ambulances, times stamps of when each micro event occurred. She speaks of the moment she was approached by a social worker in the hospital leading to her realization, but not internalization, that her husband was dead.
It is here that she first introduces the idea of magical thinking. In its darkest definition, magical thinking is the belief that we have control over our lives. That if we do or say the right thing, then the impossible is not only probable, but guaranteed. In a gentler reading, magical thinking could be the stories we tell ourselves to survive what feels unsurvivable.
Didion gives an example in a phone call the morning after her husband passed away in a New York hospital. She gets a call from a friend on the West Coast and her first thought is: “Is John even dead in California?” The three-hour time lag is an opportunity for magic that her heart and mind welcome. Another moment comes when she is unwilling to give away John’s shoes. Chalfant states matter-of-factly: “If he doesn’t have his shoes, how will he come back?”
Perhaps as an audience member, you have never lost anyone so close to you, and these premises and small bargains feel like a foreign exercise in delusion. Didion herself proclaims that she’s “going crazy” and won’t reveal to anyone how true her belief is that her husband will come back. But we are all familiar with magical thinking, even in less mortal circumstances.
It is the if this…then that of our lives. If I work hard enough then I will succeed in that extremely competitive field. If I drive carefully then I will not get in a car accident. If I tell my children I love them before they leave the house then nothing bad will happen to them that day.
It is the bargain that you make between yourself and the universe.
One of Didion’s most present magical thinkings is about her daughter, who fell severely ill and into a coma just days before John passed. During the same time period in which the work takes place, Quintana Roo Dunne was in and out of hospitals for months after her father died. Didion poured an incredible effort into the care for her daughter. She visited constantly, brushed her hair as she did when Quintana was a child, and memorized all her medications.
Chalfant-as-Didion explains one of her techniques as “avoiding the vortex.” Certain streets on the drive to the hospital trigger memories. Memories are dangerous to magical thinking because the grief of what's gone can consume you. Once again, Chalfant guilelessly presents this idea by saying: “ I can’t think about what’s gone, because the difference between then and now will take me, and I won't be there when she needs me.”
The production’s greatest success is fulfilling the initial promise of “this will happen to you,” even within the run time. Chalfant’s exceptional performance keeps an audience member in the present moment of her story, the belief that all that she is doing, thinking, and bargaining for will result in Quintana’s recovery. Only in the end do we learn that Quinatana passed away August 26, 2005 at the age of 39.
Audience members unknowingly become co-conspirators in Didion's magic, not believing Quintana will die, despite many signifiers. Chalfant, along with director Jonathan Silverstein, tells the stories Joan Didion told herself to keep her husband and daughter alive just a little longer. And indeed, Didion’s story as well: the author passed away on December 23, 2021.
While Chalfant’s pitch-perfect performance and Didion's relatable storytelling shine in this production, it is by no means an everyman story of death and disease. Peppered throughout are mentions of Tiffany bangles, diamond earrings, living in Malibu, and the many famous friends Didion and her husband had throughout their life. The more glaring signs of wealth manifest in the medical care discussed.
For anyone who has interacted with a hospital in 2023, it is hard to divorce the story from the dollar signs of months-long stays, hundreds of tests, cross country medical transit from Los Angeles to New York and all the medicines so perfectly recited. It is not on Didion or this production to represent a universal experience; it is autobiographical. But for a play about grief and death with so much discussion of medicine and care, there’s an expensive piece of the context absent.
Perhaps it is a different kind of magical thinking to believe we should all be so lucky to die with dignity, with every possible medical intervention, and to not have our families burdened with extraordinary, ruining, medical debt after our passing.
The Year of Magical Thinking is the second production to come out of Long Wharf Theatre in its recently adopted itinerant model. While last Wednesday’s opening night performance took place at Bregamos Community Theater in the city's Fair Haven neighborhood, it was easy to see how the simple set up of a chair, an incredible actor, and good source material will translate to spaces across the region.