THEATRE
Didion’s lament takes audience on a journey
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. So begins the US writer Joan Didion’s haunting memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The unexpected event ended a partnership of 40 years, just days after their only child, Quintana, had fallen dangerously ill and slipped into a coma. During the New York promotion of her memoir, Quintana became seriously ill again. Following massive brain surgery, she died at the age of 39. The famed theatre director David Hare asked Didion to transform her memoir into a play and, six months after her second tragedy, she began working on the play. It is said that The Year of Magical Thinking is a journey through that most universal experience of human pain: bereavement. While it is frequently harrowing, it is also often amusing and has been described as an expression of the power love has to give life meaning. That description is what struck director Mark Graham W...
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