the year of magical thinking

“In an instant, life as she knows it ends”. These words are striking. They are omens of danger.

The opening of the play The Year of Magical Thinking by American playwright Joan Didion at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto resonates with the power of a true story. The play is adapted from Didion's memoir of the same name and recounts the year she suddenly lost both her husband and only child. Despite the sad sensitive subject matter, the piece is an unsentimental clear-eyed exploration of grief and the unexpected feelings a once rational person might have to cope with to face it.

** watch a scene of the play

This moving story reminds us that the roots of theatre are in storytelling. The single character is beautifully played by Seana McKenna. The power of shared experiences creates a special bond with the audience that is addressed directly at different times during the play. Through the incredible specificity of the events in the narrative, Didion manages to reveal universality.

Seana McKenna

You might think you’ll be seeing it straight but you won’t.

A couple arrive home to their apartment on Upper East Side of Manhattan. The day has been difficult. They decide to eat in that evening.

It was at the table, making a salad. He was sitting across from me, talking. Either he was talking about … World  War One… or he was talking about the scotch, I have no idea which.

Then he wasn’t. Wasn’t talking.  

In an instant, life as she knows it no longer exists. Her husband is rushed to the hospital; earlier, they visited their only child in intensive care. From now on, she struggles to imagine how she will care for them both: husband and daughter.

When she returns home and colleagues and friends begin to call, she makes a secret decision that will transform the next year of her life :

Let me make myself clear. Of course I knew he was dead… Yet I was in no way prepared to accept this news as final.

That was why I needed to be alone.

I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

That was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.

The lights turn off at the end of the play and we are left dreaming about magic and its role in mourning and loss. For a while, magical thinking is the keyword. It could be a rescue from the normal laws of cause and effect; an alternative to reasonable scientific thinking. As such, magical thinking allows us to believe that human beings can observe and be present to overwhelming inexplicable situations.

After all, the play bears out the message that magic is intrinsically subjective: sometimes apparently successful and supportive, sometimes a failure, but always a metaphor of the unexpected; a sign of what lies beyond…