Acting shines in Moon for Misbegotten; Year of Magical Thinking

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If the theme of last week’s theater reviews could be summarized as “the playfulness is the thing,” this week’s two plays counter with the declaration that “the performance is the thing.” Which doesn’t mean the Aurora Fox production of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and the Cherry Creek Theatre’s two-hour-plus version of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” aren’t commanding plays, only that the anchoring performances demand special attention.

In one play, a woman of formidable intellect navigates two catastrophic losses. In the other, a woman of formidable frankness allows herself a glimmer of romantic feeling

Billie McBride portrays Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which she adapted from her 2007 memoir of the same title. There’s something chastising – maybe even threatening – in Didion’s early introduction to the events of the night of Dec. 30, 2003, when her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had a widow-making cardiac event.

Billie McBride channels the grief but more, the formidable intellect, of writer Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Photo Gail Bransteitter/Courtesy of the Aurora Fox

“That may seem awhile ago, but it won’t when it happens to you,” she says with a faint smile that feels particular to McBride. “And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. And that’s what I’m here to tell you.” It should sound like a bridge to empathy, to a grief we’ll all experience at some point, and yet … .

The pair had just returned to their New York City apartment from Beth Israel hospital, where they were visiting their only child, Quintana Roo, who was in the ICU. She was 37 at the time.

A table and chair sit in a circle of sand. McBride’s Didion slips off her shoes before taking the stage. And when she takes a seat, from time to time her bare feet lightly touch or float above that sand. The furniture and the sand seem to speak to Didion and Dunne’s bi-coastal life. For many years, the duo was famously ensconced in Malibu, Calif. Dunne and daughter Quintana took their last breaths in New York hospitals.

It is not a long play, but it is exquisitely mindful of stillness and pace. Writers are often aware of that peculiar hush in motion. Didion, who died in December 2021, was a master. She left a trove of incisive essays and books full of the piercingly observed. With Dunne, she also wrote screenplays. So much thought. So many words. So much acute calm amid the vivid.

As hot as the desert wind blows in the writer’s first novel, “Play It as It Lays” (which gets a mention or two here), her intellect has often exhibited a cool precision that founds its articulation in a scalpel-sharp and gleaming prose. This is a memory play to be sure, but also a language-rich work about the rich inadequacies of words. In Didion’s wrestling bout of grief, knowing and remembering overlap but don’t necessarily march in sync. There are limits to control.

The magic of the title finds one of its most succinct formulations when Didion shares, “of course, I knew he was dead … . Yet I myself was in no way prepared to accept this news. There was a level on which I believed whatever had happened remained open to revision. That was why I needed to be alone. I needed to be alone so he could come back.” Anyone who has lost a dear one so unexpectedly knows that sense, that hope, that once the lesson of loss has been learned, fate will return that person.

McBride as Didion tells the audience how a hospital social worker introduced her to the attending physician who’d come to tell her that her husband John had died as a “pretty cool customer.” This detail, this phrase, struck her – they so often did.



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