Just a Year ago, Joan Didion fans were reading the glad tidings from David Finkle's news in "Theater Mania" ...Vanessa Redgrave lovers, rejoice. She brings The Year of Magical Thinking to the National's Lyttelton (April 25-May 20) after playing the solo show to her usual acclaim on the New York stage. The play, directed by David Hare, is Joan Didion's adaptation of her book about what pangs of grief followed the deaths of her husband and daughter.
Before then,if not already a Didion fan,Susan Stamberg of NPR had an interview with Joan Didion that made many of us aware of her new book "The Year of Magical Thinking". If you were not a fan before,you became one as she takes you from the moment she suddenly lost her husband, and through the long yearsof watching her daughter,Quintana, suffering. The book ends with Quintana still living, but the sad news of her daughter's death is discussed on NPR in 2005, just a few months after the publishing, The Year of Magical Thinking.
So with the news of Vanessa Redgrave doing this solo show of Didion's book was perfect! Many thought only a Redgrave could do this story with the talent it would entail in portraying the story of a wife and mother's grief. It is a dark tale, and the one univeral tale we all eventually participate in, as the great Vanessa Redgrave did so this week with the loss of her daughter, Natasha Richardson.
