| Joan Didion |
Designated Mourner
Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
BY JOHN LAHR
The Theatre APRIL 9, 2007 ISSUE
David Mamet, in his new volume of polemical mischief, “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” coins the term “affliction drama” for the genre of entertainment that “enlists the human capacity for sympathy and asks the sympathetic to weep.” Mamet calls this a “hijacking of the dramatic transaction,” the theatrical equivalent of “bringing a gun to a knife fight.” In such scenarios, human suffering trumps both dramaturgy and discourse. The intellectual blackmail implicit in these plays, Mamet argues, is: Do you appreciate this play, or do you hate blacks, the bereaved, the autistic? The latest example of this sort of theatrical buttonholing is “The Year of Magical Thinking” (directed by David Hare, at the Booth), Joan Didion’s stage adaptation of her brilliant, best-selling memoir, a chronicle of the year following the unmooring loss of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, which she has updated for Broadway with the additional unbearable news of her daughter Quintana’s death, two years later, at the age of thirty-nine. As tales of woe go, the Ancient Mariner has nothing on Ms. Didion, whose combination of lapidary prose and emotional control makes her a riveting, complex messenger of heartbreak and survival.