Vanessa
Redgrave brings to light the painful, exquisitely told story
of Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” an
account of the death of her 
husband,
John Gregory Dunne, in 2003 and twenty months later of their
daughter. Miss Didion, who wrote the stage adaptation
of her award-winning best-seller, is a screenwriter, journalist,
and novelist, whose best-known works include Play
It as It Lays and Slouching
Towards Jerusalem. As a journalist,
she gives the exact details of her husband’s death from a
massive heart attack as they sat down to dinner, how he slumps
and then falls, the call to 911, arrival of the ambulance,
and her ordeal at the hospital.
She begins
matter-of-factly in a way that led the hospital social worker
to describe her as “a cool customer:”
“This happened on December 30,
2003. That may seem a while ago, but it won’t when
it happens to you…You don’t want to think it could happen
to you. That’s why I’m here.”
She and
her husband had just returned from visiting their grown daughter
Quintana in the hospital, where she lay comatose, in septic
shock, five days after entering the hospital with flu-like symptoms. John was drinking his second Scotch, asking
about the brand “sitting across from me talking. Then he wasn’t. Wasn’t talking.” In the first words of the book,
“Life changes
fast.
Life changes
in the instant.
You sit
down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
These were the first words she wrote after his death.
One reason
she examines and writes about everything she can about her
experience in facing his death and the aftermath is that she
believes she might be able to consider it “a kind of first
draft,” from which she might come to terms. Along with the soul-shaking events that follow
the death – the attempts to know exactly how and when he actually
died, and the funeral service in all its detail – are interspersed
her memories of their life together in 40 years of marriage,
including the houses they lived in, and the countries they
visited, as writers. Other memories that recur are those of
daughter Quintana: at three days old being brought home from
the hospital, and Didion’s first use of the sentences often
repeated to the child and then the grown woman, who had married
only a year before her father died: “You’re safe. I’m here.” During
the “magical thinking” of the year following John’s death,
Didion refuses to accept that John is actually dead; in the
hope that he might return, she does not give away his shoes,
thinking that he will need them when he comes back.
Their testy encounters are here too, as she recalls
his recurring question, “Why must you always be right?”
All of the
heart-wrenching details Ms. Redgrave delivers with a grace
and a depth that is mesmerizing as the audience becomes almost
one with the character she portrays. For ninety minutes the
actress holds the stage alone, in her grey skirt and white
blouse, her hair in a pony tail, except when at times she
releases it, to become the young, adventurous woman she remembers
herself being, watching the fireworks in Hawaii, the lighting
shining her hair yellow. Reminiscing
about Quintana, who, we learn, died just as the book went
to press, she points to a thin gold bracelet on her wrist,
and asks, “Do you remember I said I gave her a bracelet like
this one?” She pauses. “I gave her this one.” (Booth Theater, 222 W. 45th Street, New
York, N.Y. 10036; phone: 212-239-6200).
In London, the Royal Court Theatre has always championed women writers, producing Caryl
Churchill’s and Sarah Kane’s early plays, and the Court’s
roster in the current season finds 
two
outstanding works by new playwrights. “That Face,” by Polly Stenham, was written when
she was nineteen, as a graduate of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Program. Lindsay Duncan was hailed by the critics, who
also praised the play, in the central role of Martha, a chronic
alcoholic, whose incestuous feelings for her son Henry traumatizes
him and causes him to leave school to care for her.
Her well-to-do husband has moved to Shanghai, abandoning the family, which includes daughter Mia
at an upper-class boarding school.
Indulging in a sadistic hazing at her school, Mia lands
in trouble, calling home her father to handle the legal matters
that ensue.
“Leaves”
at the Royal Court is Lucy Caldwell’s first full-length play, earning
praise from John Peter of the Times
for its “maturity, thoughtful compassion,
and controlled theatricality of experience.”
Nineteen-year-old Lori (Kathy Rose O’Brien) has just
returned to her Belfast home from attending an English university, where she
tried to kill herself. Lori’s
shattered family attempts to comprehend her actions and to
cope with the impact of her clinical depression. Her youngest
sister Poppy retreats to the story of Peter Pan, the boy who
never grew up, and middle sister Clover questions her former
emulation of Lori. Mother
Phyllis (Fiona Bell) and Dad David (Conor Lovett) do their
best by respectively turning to nurturing and writing, to
cope with their inability to reach Lori. Garry Hynes directs
the production, which transfers from the Druid Theatre in
Galway.
Earlier
in the season, the Royal Court staged “The Eleventh Capital” by Alexandra Wood, another
graduate of the Court’s Young Writers Program. We never meet the protagonist, a civil servant
in a military regime, possibly in Burma. The unnamed
man is being sent to a new capital the regime is creating,
and we learn about him from people who talk about him; they
may be spies or just eavesdroppers.
In the first scene, an office cleaning woman gossips
to her neighbor about how the civil servant wished to resign
rather than to be transferred away from his family, but his
boss refused. In the
second scene, thieves discuss how they might rob the protagonist’s
unprotected home and rape his wife, left alone with her two
young sons. We listen
to his colleagues disparage him and we learn of his affair
with the peasant woman in whose house he is billeted. Finally, we hear his wife in distress as she
leaves the new capital after a final meeting with her unfortunate
husband. What might the regime do with this man whom we now
seem to know but have never met?
Destroy him? He is not actually bad, from what we hear, but
just weak. Natalie
Abrahami directed a production that conveyed an overwhelming
sense of unease caused by the unknown, rather like a Kafka
setting. This sense
was enhanced by using the audience area as the site of barbed
wire barricades being erected by super-efficient military
personnel. (Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS; phone: 020 7565 5000)
“Kindertransport”
at the Hampstead Theatre, is an impressive revival of Diane
Samuels’ 1992 play about the Jewish
children sent from Nazi Germany to refuge in England. Imaginatively
directed by Polly Teale for Shared Experience, it centers
upon one such refugee, nine-year-old Eva, who in 1938 must
leave her home in Hamburg for Manchester. When World War II breaks out, the child’s family
is destroyed, and she must make a new life for herself. Her old life lies buried in boxes in her attic
until Eva, now repressed, neurotic, re-named Evelyn, is in
her fifties, when her daughter Faith discovers the old photographs
and letters.
In Ms. Teale’s
direction, past and present meet as Evelyn (Marion Bailey)
meets the child Eva, who has had to survive and suppress her
pain and anger, as the two must evade the Ratcatcher, a storybook
villain who stole children, recalled from Eva’s childhood
fears. Author Samuels
points out that the play deals with an eternal theme – children
being separated from their parents.
‘We all separate from our parents, we will all separate
from our children and the play tackles that. There’s not one human being alive who doesn’t
go through that experience.”
(Hampstead Theatre, 98 Avenue Road, Haringey,
London NW3. Phone: 020
7722 9301)
Moira Buffini’s
adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s “The Suicide,” banned by the
Soviet Union in 1932, was a recent hit at the Almeida Theatre in
London. A satirical
farce, its hero is an unemployed, disappointed “little man,”
Semyon, who decides to commit suicide.
The news is seized upon by those who would exploit
the event of his demise to further their own ends, including
a priest (Tony Rohr) more interested in vodka than in saving
souls, an uneasy intellectual (Ronan Vibert), a prostitute
and property-owner (Sophie Stanton), and a spying postman
whose loyalty to the party requires him to look through keyholes
“from a Marxist point of view.”
That the dreamed-of utopia seems far off gives rise
not only to disillusionment but also to corruption. At the center is Tom Brooke as Semyon, a celebrity
now that his suicide is imminent.
As a party is planned to commemorate the event, Semyon
must decide whether he wants to go through with his demise.
Anna Mackmin
directed.
Women
Playwrights in New York
Rachel Dickstein
writes in the program notes for her new play “Betrothed” that
in Jewish tradition the year before marriage is the time of
a woman’s greatest strength. Her three-part work demonstrating this thesis
is based on three stories about women looking forward to marriage,
by Jhumpa Lahiri, Anton Chekhov, and
S.Ansky. Spoken dialogue
and movement are enhanced by poetic images and sound, with
a score by Vijay Iyer played by a cellist and flutist with
electronic music. The
first story, Ms. Lahiri’s “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,”
lighted in warm saffron, concerns a woman (Mahira Kakkar)
whose epilepsy prevents her from finding a suitor.
Cured by having a child by an unknown father, she hopes
for a traditional marriage. White is the color dominating
Chekhov’s story “Betrothed,” in which the ideal engagement
of Nadya (Lula Graves) cools when a friend encourages her
to flee her colorless existence and her family, and to pursue
studies. Based on Ansky’s “The Dybbuk,” the final section
deals with the story of a love that is thwarted but which
continues beyond the grave when the spirit (dybbuk) of the
dead lover possesses his loved one.
Daniel Irizarry plays the title role.
(Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, New
York, N.Y.; phone: 212-868-4444.)
Polly Teale’s
highly dramatic adaptation of “Jane Eyre” is an ideal presentation
for college theaters, as proved by its production at the Performing
Arts Center of Baruch College.
Ms. Teale’s trilogy began with this adaptation, followed
by “After Mrs. Rochester,” in London’s West
End, and
“The Brontes,” in all of which Bertha Mason (the madwoman
in the attic) plays a role. Ms. Teale suggests that Bertha (Carie Kawa),
standing alongside Jane (Hannah Cabell) in this production
directed by Davis McCallum, represents the wild, sexual side
of rational, modest Jane. In some productions, Bertha is played by a dancer.
(Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue at 25th Street, New
York, N.Y.; phone: 212-279-4200)
Jenny Schwartz’s
“God’s Ear” concerns the death of a son and its effect on
a family as their relationship disintegrates. Produced by
the New Georges theater company, it is directed by Anne Kauffman.
Fantasy and reality merge as a couple, Mel (Christina
Kirk) and Ted (Gibson Frazier), begin their marriage with
promises for the future. Soon the promises begin to stale, and Ms. Kirk’s
monologue is a high point of the drama as she details the things that went wrong. The dream world and the real world merge, with
some characters appearing out of trap doors, while others
ascend to the heavens. The
impact of their son’s dying is seen as Ted keeps meeting people
with dead children, and as Mel grieves while following the
routines of her life. (East 13th Street Theater, 136 E. 13th St., New
York, N.Y.; phone: 212-868-4444)
“Coram Boy”
is Helen Edmundson’s stage adaptation of the novel by Jamila
Gavin, transferred from London, where it was the National Theatre’s 
hit
Christmas production for 2005 and 2006.
Directed and designed by Melly Still, it tells the
story of two choir boys who become friends, although one is
high-born and the other is lowly. The story begins in Gloucestershire,
where Lord and Lady Ashbrook reside with their son Alexander,
a choir boy who hopes for a musical career, but whose hopes
fade when his father removes all musical instruments from
their stately home. In the second act, the action moves to
the Foundling Home in London, the first of its kind, founded by Captain Thomas
Coram in 1742 for abandoned children. One of the orphans there
turns out to be a musical genius. Both William Hogarth and
Handel were patrons of the home, and a performance of the
Hallelujah chorus from “The Messiah” concludes the play. read
more in News (Imperial Theater, 249 W. 45th Street, New
York, N.Y.; phone: 212-239-6200.)
Looking
ahead, the Manhattan Theatre Club announces two plays by women
scheduled for next season at their Biltmore Theater on West 47th Street. Theresa Rebeck,
the co-author of “Omnium Gatherum,” will make her Broadway
debut with “Mauritius.” The play concerns two half-sisters whose mother’s
death leaves them in possession of a rare stamp collection. Also on the roster for the Biltmore is a revival
of Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” about Marlene, the ambitious
head of a women’s employment agency in London in the early
eighties, who summons to a meeting the “top girls” of previous
centuries. Performance schedule: www.mtc-nyc.org.
(Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS. Phone: 020
7565 5000)
