Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
The Year of Magical Thinking
February 15, 2010
The Center Did Not Hold
Thanks to all who came out for our closing night special event, The Center Did Not Hold, a celebration of Joan Didion through her early essays. Some of you asked for the names of the essays that were read aloud, so here’s the full list from yesterday afternoon:
Mary Beth Fisher read “On Going Home” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Chris Sullivan read “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Kaitlin Byrd read “At the Dam” from The White Album
Sean Graney read “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Chris Piatt read “Los Angeles Notebook” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Heidi Coleman read “Seacoast of Despair” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Paul Durica read “The White Album” from The White Album
Chloe Johnston read “On Self-Respect” from,= Slouching Toward Bethlehem
January 22, 2010
Notes on The Year of Magical Thinking
I’m sitting in a Saturday morning tech rehearsal for The Year of Magical Thinking and, as usual, I’m trying not to make too much noise. Across the house from me is the design team, the director, and the technical staff, their faces ghostly from the light of their personal computer screens. They’re all watching the stage as Josh, the assistant director, marks out a simple, elegant choreography with a half-smirk on his face as Mary Beth Fisher, the actor playing the character of Joan, delivers her lines from a seat in the house. It’s an exercise designed so that Mary Beth can comprehend the new context of light, space, sound, and (yes) video projection that she’s been recently loaded-into this weekend. Josh, for the moment, is her sole understudy, carefully reconstructing her blocking down to the inch as Mary Beth speaks the lines to herself. It’s a strange piece of performance art, but an oddly fitting embodiment of Joan Didion’s prose: formal, structural, a kind of dire game of Twister. “Half-step downstage, Josh,” directs Jennifer Tipton, the lighting designer. He moves.
In late 2004, Joan Didion began writing about the recent death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the ongoing illness of her daughter, Quintana. Those early notes—some composed at the height of bewildering grief—became the book The Year of Magical Thinking. The manuscript was already finished and sent to the printers when Didion’s daughter passed away in August 2005. Published barely over a month later, the book became an immediate bestseller and garnered a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. In late 2006, at the encouragement of producer Scott Rudin, Didion began work on a play based on The Year of Magical Thinking. The play retained certain passages from the book, but it also included certain new material, including an account of Quintana’s death and the aftermath. For Didion, an author of five novels, eleven works of nonfiction, and a handful of Hollywood screenplays, it was her first piece of writing for the theater. Produced in London in 2007 with David Hare directing and Vanessa Redgrave in the role of Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play has been produced on Broadway and at regional theaters throughout the United States.
January 19, 2010
Preview Weekend
What a difference an audience makes! We just finished our first weekend of preview performances for The Year of Magical Thinking, and so far I’ve learned so much from our audience’s reaction. Each night, in talk backs, I get the chance to listen directly to audience feedback, to hear some of our artistic choices validated, to hear some called into question. I’ve been stunned by the number of people who are staying to talk to us about this show. I can’t remember the last time I saw an audience so hungry to verbalize their experience and share their own personal memories. It’s a play that actively encourages a response.
This week, Mary Beth and I are still working most closely on the last quarter of the play. It’s a difficult section. Without giving too much away, the character of Joan has a subtle but distinct change of intention three-quarters into the play, and we’ve been taking our time figuring out what that new intention really is. Joan Didion, who has been enormously helpful in talking openly about the play with Mary Beth and I, took the time to email me a few responses to some questions I’d asked of her play. I’m thrilled to put some of these new thoughts to action in our next few nights of previews. Please join us as we continue to discover the complexities of this piece!
January 11, 2010
Tech Weekend
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the most pleasant weekend of tech I’ve experienced in recent memory. So often we’re racing against time to assemble all the moving parts and production elements of a show just so that the thing can stand on its own two feet by the final dress rehearsal. Because of the simple, elegant design of The Year of Magical Thinking, that stress was largely alleviated, allowing Mary Beth and I and the design team the opportunity to spend the weekend honing specific moments in the story.
The design team for this play has been a veritable dream team. We have Jennifer Tipton designing lights, Susan Hilferty designing clothes, my long-time collaborator John Culbert on the set, and Andre Pluess on sound. I’m also working for the first time with Mike Tutaj, who has created a startling and sublime video design for the production. Much of this weekend was given over to orchestrating what we’ve come to call the “magical thinking” moments of the play: moments where the character of Joan slips into a non-rational understanding of the traumatic events surrounding her. Mary Beth has continued to play an important role as co-collaborator, to the point where she often sits in the house to study her own light, sound, and video cues and offer her feedback.
Officially we have three more working days until the first preview, and there’s still much work to be done. Striking the right tone at the opening and the closing of the play are of the utmost importance (“How do we start? How do we end?”) and those are the moments that Mary Beth and I are still fine-tuning. In this show more than most, divinity is all in the details. There’s always the possibility that some of our thinking will completely change when we get our first audience—but that’s a thrill I look forward to with every show!
January 8, 2010
The Year of Magical Thinking Rehearsals
Welcome to Court Theatre’s blog, Open Rehearsal! I’m Artistic Director Charlie Newell, and I’ll be chronicling my rehearsal process of The Year of Magical Thinking all the way up through our first preview on January 14 and beyond. The process for this upcoming show has been so unusual and personally challenging that I thought it worthwhile to share it here.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s dramatic adaptation of her own memoir. It is a moving but piercingly honest account of the death of her husband, John, and the year of disorientation that followed. The play also chronicles the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana, less than two years later. Written for only a single actor, it is an Everest of dramatic writing.
Despite the unexpected pleasure of getting my wisdom teeth removed last month, Mary Beth Fisher and I began rehearsal on The Year of Magical Thinking in early December and continued all the way up to our holiday break. Because this play is written for only one actor, our rehearsals have been more flexible, though not less focused. Mary Beth and I are free to test-drive new ideas, thoughts, and instincts about Joan Didion’s text as they crop up, and the dead ends we discover are equally important to the breakthroughs. A constant concern of ours, of course, is to modulate the tone of the piece. We face two pitfalls: on the one hand, sentimentality, and on the other, cold detachment. Every day, like frontier surveyors, we discover a little bit more of the emotional truth of the text.
This week we finished up our time in the rehearsal hall with a full-blown run-through of the show for our design team, and I’m thrilled with how far the piece has come. Today we move into the theater to begin tech, but even as my immediate attention turns to lights and sound and space, I still haven’t completed my work with Mary Beth. Just this week the two of us discovered a new understanding of the last third of the show, and I’m eager to try out our new ideas!
