Review: The Year of Magical Thinking at Main Street Theater

Adapted by Joan Didion herself, The Year of Magical Thinking is a compelling elegy. While the original book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle awards, the stage adaptation was no stranger to positive reception and award nominations.

An autobiographical one-woman show, this play explores the loss of Didion’s husband, John Dunne, and the subsequent grief. Not only does her husband die but also concurrently her daughter has health complications after experiencing septic shock which landed her in a coma.

Currently playing at Main Street Theater, this play, directed by Rebecca Greene Udden, is an honest and poignant expression of loss made astronomically better by the precise and profound performance of Pamela Vogel. Vogel astounds as she bottles the loss and pours it out little-by-little out to the audience. Her grief doesn’t overflow and come out in the form of overflowing tears or hysterical fits of woe and denial. She flouts the emotions of overt sadness and despair.

The fact that she is rational is oft repeated. She rattles off details of her husband’s death and care like she was a mere bystander. The details demonstrate just how clear-eyed she is in the midst of emotional turmoil. She vividly explains how she told her still-hospitalized-recently-out-of-a-coma daughter of the death of her father-and her husband.

She shares how the funeral arrangements happen and she lets the audience know that she is choosing to engage in magical thinking- inspired by the anthropology of primitive cultures, of course. Even in the midst of grief, she masquerades her need to hold on to her husband through a spurious connection with how early humans lived.

Vogel doesn’t emote in the way expected of those dealing with grief and the dialogue seems too matter-of-fact and detached at times to sort out the specifics of feelings yet it is clear in the delivery of her lines that she is experiencing loss and she is at a loss. Her mind is aware, but her body feels elsewhere. Vogel’s grief feels so particular yet inarticulable. Grief isn’t an emotional state. It’s now become her life.

As the play continues, the narrative oscillates between memories, philosophical reflections on death and details of what’s happening with her daughter. Vogel seamlessly shifts between tender memories of her husband and daughter, clinical descriptions of her daughter’s treatment plans and moments of utter disbelief of what’s happening. One moment she nostalgically waxes on about fond memories in Honolulu and the next her tone hardens and she describes another harsh medical encounter her daughter experiences.

The technical design could have done a better job playing a role in taking the audience through these transitions as the time period, mood, and location would switch on a dime. However, the focus of Udden’s endeavor is Pamela Vogel, and no fault can be found with that decision.

In a standout scene, Vogel must finally admit the limits she has to control the outcome of her daughter’s life. The facial contortion of the devastation. The way her mouth opens to yell but nothing comes out. What a palpable sense of powerlessness.

The play concludes with no real sense of resolution just as grief has no final resolution. Vogel has not arrived at the classical sense of interior peace and understanding that much grief literature says will be experienced. She accepts the loss not in the sense that she’s reached the final stage of grief. Moreso her husband and her daughter are no longer physically with her, and she accepts that fact.

This production highlights how grief isn’t a linear process. It’s incomprehensible. It’s destabilizing. Death is an inevitable fact of life. No one could argue otherwise, yet when it comes, it’s like rain in the desert.

Death is an agent of chaos that no individual can control. It leaves in its wake all those who it didn’t take with them and existential questions that can rarely ever be resolved.

But life moves on even though death can’t be fully understood. Those we lose become people very much alive in our imaginations yet absent from our reality. To that, this play doesn’t say “that’s unfair.” Instead, this play says, “it is what it is.”

Performances continue through November 17 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays at Main Street Theatre - Rice Village, 2540 Times Boulevard. For more information, call 713-524-6706 or visit mainstreettheater.com. $45-$64.