I wouldn’t have pegged the late journalist/novelist/screenwriter Joan Didion as the husband-cosseting homebody type: she seemed too California-cool, too cerebral – and above all, too busy. Her memoir-derived dramatization of two anni horribiles– she lost her husband in 2003, her adult daughter in 2005 – shows us her soft side, one which Kathleen Chalfant shares generously in parlor performances taking place in borrowed living rooms and community centers about town. (NB: The performances, admitting 35 attendees max, are nearly sold out: Chalfant’s fans are as easily as avid as Didion’s.)
Before settling into to our sofas and mismatched armchairs. the twenty or so of us attending a recent seance-like summoning started out knowing much of the story. Many had read Didion’s 2005 book or seen Vanessa Redgrave performing the script Didion adapted from it for Broadway in 2007. Those of us as yet uninitiated were in for the gentlest introduction imaginable, thanks in large part to Keen Company artistic director Jonathan Silverstein’s vision for a scaled-down, close-up exploration.
Chalfant as Didion recalls an evening chez soi: December 30, 2003. She and John Gabriel Dunne – her spouse of 39 years, equally lauded as a writer – had recently returned from a romantic trip to Paris. “I said I would build a fire … I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink. I got him a Scotch … “ This is clearly a woman who loves her husband, literally dotes on him. Before that dinner is done, Dunne will fall face forward onto the table, felled mid-meal by a long-anticipated heart attack.
Didion spent the ensuing year in a state of denial and dissociation so profound, she put off giving away Dunne’s personal effects, thinking he might need them. Relentlessly rational all her life, after his death she couldn’t help viewing the event as what lawyers call “a reversible error”: “Of course I knew he was dead… Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that whatever had happened remained open to revision.”
“It will happen to you,” Didion warns, and Chalfant reaches out to us, one by one, with her eyes. It’s the kind of connection that might discomfit those of us accustomed to handling our feelings alone, independently, in the dark. But Chalfant exudes a kindness and concern one can bask in. Instantly, we’re assured that she will tell this story right, in its emotional fullness, with all its poignant details.
As just one example: Didion confesses that she bought blue cotton scrubs in order to slip in, unnoticed, to visit her comatose daughter. She chides herself for trying – true to form – to maintain some modicum of control, at the risk of having the strategy “construed as a suspicious violation of boundaries.” What we see is a mother who’ll do whatever it takes to help ease the way for a suffering child. “You’re safe, I’m here” is the incantation Didion retained from her daughter’s childhood. She feels compelled to repeat it, like a spell, in the hope that her unconscious child may hear.
Many a play and performance vie for the title of “transformative.” This one truly is. Accomplishing an intimate rapport with her listeners, Chalfant adroitly chisels her way into our hardened, worldly, over-burdened hearts. “Only connect,” counseled E.M. Foster. This Chalfant achieves, with seeming ease and enough warmth to tide us over as we head back out into a harsh, less forgiving world.
The Year of Magical Thinking opened November 2, 2022, at various locations in New York City and runs through November 20. Tickets and information: keencompany.org
