But when Michael arrived at LAX, she fainted and later underwent six hours of neurosurgery to relieve a hematoma. Five days later, after Didion returned home from a hospital visit, her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed at the dinner table with a fatal coronary.īy the end of January 2004, her daughter’s condition had improved a memorial service was held for Dunne, and Michael made plans to recuperate in Los Angeles with her husband. On Christmas Day 2003, her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was admitted to the intensive care unit at Manhattan’s Beth Israel North hospital after a bout of flu became pneumonia and then septic shock a coma was induced and Michael was placed on life support. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The lines that now reverberate in her inner ear are Eliot’s: “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In her new book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the life that persists amid the disorder is Didion’s, and the salient tatter of poetry that inspires her is from T.S.
Her pieces examine how lives do and do not withstand such disintegration. Despite our nostalgic illusions - of the sort she dissolved in her 2003 book on California, “Where I Was From” - no center has ever held.
Although she has an acute sense of historical decay - of the discontinuities that estranged the Haight-Ashbury generation from their parents’ universe, of the focus-group politics that have estranged us from Washington - her writing encompasses far more than stories of contemporary decline. What Didion does is something more difficult and enduring. To say that those essays as well as her subsequent works also reflect the notion that things are falling apart is a literary allusion that many will recognize in most ways, it is perfectly true. concordtheatricals.The back cover of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s first collection of essays and the book that established her as one of a handful of major contemporary writers, advises that her pieces “all reflect, in one way or another, the notion that things are falling apart, that ‘the center cannot hold.’ ” That phrase is from Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” the poem that provided Didion with the 1968 book’s evocative title such slouching perhaps now is more firmly associated with Didion than with Yeats. The Year of Magical Thinking is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. Run time is approximately 90 minutes, without an intermission. This unique theatrical event will be brought directly to the people, staged in non-traditional theater spaces including living rooms, libraries, and other community spaces throughout New York City.
Join Keen Company for the first New York revival of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, and starring Obie and Drama Desk Award-winner Kathleen Chalfant in a moving one-woman performance.Īdapted from the best-selling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking recounts Didion’s journey of loss, perseverance, and ultimately hope, using her signature wit to draw an intimate portrait of the resilience of the human heart. “This Keen Company production goes small, and in doing so, gets the play sublimely right." - The New York Times The Year of Magical ThinkingĪ Play by Joan Didion, Based on Her MemoirĬonception and Direction by Jonathan Silverstein
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