Lessons in Survival from Joan Didion
When asked the difference between her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking and the play, Joan Didion answered: “When I was writing the book, I did not know whether or not I would survive. When I was writing the play, I knew that I had survived.”1
In November 2009, Joan Didion invited Mary Beth Fisher and Charlie Newell to her Upper East Side apartment for afternoon tea and to share her lessons in survival. Faced with the apartment door, Mary Beth’s mind raced. After all, she was about to come face to face with the woman whose brain she had been inhabiting for months. “What if she is nothing like I’ve imagined?” worried Mary Beth. “What if she doesn’t like me? What if I don’t like her?” As she and Charlie entered the apartment, Mary Beth handed Didion a gift: a white orchid with a peppermint stripe. Didion looked at it and responded, “this is perfect.” Then she led them to the living room where they sat on her sofa and Didion sat in a wooden chair. “She was allowing complete strangers from Chicago into her apartment to sit down and have a conversation about something so personal,” remembers Charlie. “To me it was an honor. Very generous.” He expressed to Didion how necessary the book The Year of Magical Thinking had been to him after the passing of his mother. He then told her he hoped to honor and serve her intent in presenting the Chicago premiere of the play.
Without a word—without needing words—Didion invited their questions. Mary Beth explained that she couldn’t think of the narrator as Joan Didion but rather as a character like any other which must be discovered and presented on the stage. Didion agreed, saying that she does not think of this character as herself anymore. She wrote the book in an effort to process what was happening to her. When asked by the National Theatre in London to adapt it to the stage, she had her doubts. Because she trusted the producer, however, and because she had never worked in the theater, she went ahead.2 Didion told Mary Beth and Charlie that she understood the difference between experiencing the play in the theater and reading the book. Didion now thinks of herself as audience, the receiver, a listener, rather than the creator of the piece. She maintains distance. Charlie felt a sense of affirmation: the author is letting this piece go into the world and trusts it in the hands of others.
Throughout the conversation, Mary Beth was struck by Didion’s wicked sense of humor. Charlie was struck by her long but active silences in which he nevertheless could see the thoughts moving in her mind. Didion spoke about the act of discovery and understanding through the act of typing. In her early career, she would type out Hemingway to better understand his structure, and Mary Beth admitted that she had typed out the text of Didion’s play to better understand Joan Didion. Sitting there, Charlie realized that the actor isn’t so different from the writer. Each has an active need of understanding satisfied by the action of making the text; the writer types and the actor speaks.
As the afternoon tea drew to an end, Charlie and Mary Beth felt like Didion was giving them her blessing to present her play. Perhaps the most significant moment came when, as they were leaving, Didion told them that a hybrid orchid had been named after her daughter Quintana Roo. Mary Beth asked her what it looked like. White, Didion said, with a peppermint stripe. Like the exchange between artists that afternoon, the gift of the orchid had been perfect indeed.
Charlie and Mary Beth’s visit with Didion gave them more than a glimpse into the complex woman that is Joan Didion, a glimpse that has lingered with Charlie and Mary Beth through the intensive rehearsal process. It seemed to pass the torch from the writer of the play to the creators of this production. Didion has described the process of adapting her memoir to the stage as a “liberating experience,”3 and this production strives to offer those who see it the strength, beauty, and creativity that let Didion survive her year of magical thinking.
Megan Geigner is Court Theatre’s Production Dramaturg for The Year of Magical Thinking.
1 Renee Montange. “Didion brings ‘Magical Thinking’ to Broadway.” NPR Morning Addition. Feb 8, 2007.
2 Anita Gates. “Joan Didion’s ‘Magical Thinking,’ Playing in a City of Memories” 3 ibid
Photograph: Actress Mary Beth Fisher and Artistic Director Charles Newell early in the rehearsal process for The Year of Magical Thinking (courtesy of Will Anderson).
–Megan Geigner
