Overthinking of grief makes for theater of little magic

NEW YORK - On a bare stage, in an unadorned slat chair, the woman mourns. Or she acts the role of a woman who mourns. This is no picky distinction.

Who is really acting the mourner in The Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion's stage adaptation of the award-winning memoir that traces her journey in the aftermath of her husband's death? Is it only the exceptional Vanessa Redgrave, portraying Didion in this one-woman elegy that opened Thursday night on Broadway? Or is the actress also Didion, who envelops her grieving in such intellectual passion that she strangles it?

This will happen to you, just you wait, she tells us - and she's right and wrong. Yes, we all will grieve, it's a part of being alive. And granted, our daily routines will come confoundingly apart for the duration, as Didion shows so clearly.

But most of us, I think, will be hit solid by grief as it comes in waves. We won't analyze our mourning as a way of preventing it, or convince ourselves - as does Didion, through most of the play - that the dead will return if only we don't change a word in his undone manuscript or give away his shoes.

It's not my desire to minimize Didion's grief or dance on her gravitas. I respect her enormously thoughtful body of work - her novels include A Book of Common Prayer, her essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. With her novelist husband, John Gregory Dunne, she wrote the screenplays for Up Close and Personal, Panic in Needle Park, and other films.

She lost him while their only child, daughter Quintana, was near death in a New York hospital. Not long after that, she lost Quintana, too - a trail of pain and trial of perseverance.

And then she wrote a memoir, excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, a 2005 cover story that felt bloodless to me at the time and only a little less aloof when I reread it before the show. (I haven't read the full account, a bestseller that won the National Book Award and just came out in paperback.)

The excerpt is a mix of reportage, reflection and literary prowess, and much of it appears in the play. For all her screenwriting, Didion adapted the work into a reorganized piece of reading, not of theater.

Redgrave embodies a wonderfully chiseled form of Joan Didion or, more likely, someone representing Joan Didion: personable and down-to-earth, then subtly glib and taken with literary allusions. In a white blouse and long gray skirt, she is the poster woman for mature beauty; she lets her pearly hair down for only a few minutes, and radiates along with her acting.

The character she builds, to a backdrop of occasionally falling scrims in various blurs of gray, and under the direction of playwright David Hare, is elegant. But the words Didion provides are artificial and forced when spoken. As Didion deals with her daughter's illness, a day "unfolds with the nonsequential inexorability of a dream." That tells you a lot.

When Didion explores her guilt about assuring her daughter that healthy times will return, she's completely believable; it's the most conversational and gut-wrenching part of the script. But most of the time, Didion's dialogue is unworkable. Litany does wonders for Mass, but on stage, employed every few minutes, the repetition's a bore. Magical Thinking is virtually without contractions, raising the status of the apostrophe to a precious gem.

Didion's magical thinking strengthened her resolve to appear impenetrable, and when emotion finally comes, it's hollow. In her brain, she has thoroughly massaged her grief. On stage, though, she's knifed her heart.