Magical Thinking not so magical onstage
The stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking has opened in New York, and several critics are using it as fodder to discuss the frequently problematic issues surrounding book-to-stage translations. The play is a one-woman show starring Vanessa Redgrave as Didion, and the script – which dramatizes Didion’s response to the recent deaths of her husband and daughter – was written by Didion herself. In The New York Times, critic Ben Brantley (who is an acquaintance of the author) argues that the play is unable to convey the essential qualities of Didion’s prose:
The dynamic in the book arises from the tension between [her polished], impenetrable style and the emotions that war with it, that mock its elegant self-containment. That Ms. Didion never abandons those careful, chiseled sentences paradoxically leads us straight to the feelings beneath them.
[…] That tension has not been translated to the stage. Ms. Redgrave sounds all the emotional notes in the play clearly and articulately in its first sequences, meaning there’s no further journey for her to take us on.
Meanwhile, in an article entitled “Didion v. Didion,” Slate contributor Amanda Fortini argues that the stage play lays bare the flaws that were only vaguely discernible on the page:
There are writers whose work would naturally lend itself to a one-woman show, but Didion is not among them […] For all her invocation of I, she is never truly confessional. Her autobiographical writing might be described as a literary fan dance, in which she seduces the reader through revelatory feints but ultimately exposes very little.
And in The New Yorker, John Lahr claims that the play contains an unpleasant element of audience castigation not found in the book:
Didion establishes her stage character […] as a sort of self-dramatizing doyenne of desolation. This whiff of condescension subverts the fetching frailty of Didion’s literary persona. What felt like curiosity in the book becomes grandiosity on the stage; her grief must be attended to. “Nobody gets out of life alive,” Tennessee Williams said. But Didion, in this misguided act of exhibitionism, seems to imply that she’s got a lock on loss.
