The Year of Magical Thinking: A moving rehearsal for death

What makes attending the theatre special can also make it almost unbearably sad: A performance exists at a certain point in time and space, and then it is gone forever.

Wondering why this ephemeral art form continues to exist after the invention of recording technologies, scholar Peggy Phelan has theorized, "It may be that theatre and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death."

This somewhat abstract academic theory hit home during the Belfry Theatre's production of Joan Didion's autobiographical play The Year of Magical Thinking, in which the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Seana McKenna gives an elegantly moving performance as the American writer.

Didion first published her meditation on all-too-imaginable loss as a memoir in 2005, but it is only live on stage that it has found its true form.

The book concerns a tragic confluence of events that left Didion in shock in 2003: Five days after her only daughter Quintana entered the hospital with a life-threatening illness, Didion's husband John suddenly died of a heart attack. He keeled over in front of her in the middle of a dinner conversation that was either about the First World War or single-malt Scotch (understandably, Didion is not entirely certain).

In her memoir, Didion chronicles the ensuing months of monitoring her daughter's recovery while lost in what she calls "magical thinking" - a state of mind in which she kept believing, irrationally, that her husband would come back if she followed certain rituals and avoided others.

For instance, she had no trouble giving away her husband's suits, but could not part with his shoes because he'd need them when he returned.

Shortly after The Year of Magical Thinking made it to print, Didion's grief was compounded: Quintana had a relapse and died as well. It was then that Didion updated and adapted her memoir into a play, her first work for the theatre after a long career of novels, journalism and screenplays.

Whether Didion is aware of Phelan's theory of performance or not, she explicitly frames the show as a way to rehearse the audience for the death of their loved ones. "It will happen to you," she says. "That's what I'm here to tell you."

You might expect a tragic performance of Greek or Shakespearean proportions from McKenna. But, under the measured direction of Michael Shamata, she gives a tightly controlled portrait of Didion the intellectual, who hides behind a shield of carefully crafted words to keep her emotions at bay.

Indeed, though she addresses the audience directly, McKenna's Didion is a somewhat prickly narrator. The social worker assigned to her at the hospital the night her husband dies calls her a "cool customer," and he is right. She has a way of dropping names, places and publications that can be alienating to those audience members who have never owned a pair of Corvettes.

But the narrator is distancing herself as well as the audience, and McKenna's restrained performance only makes the eventual appearance of cracks in her veneer more wrenching. She performs in front of a black wall designed by John Ferguson that sometimes functions as a mirror and sometimes gives us an oblique peek into a hospital room behind. Similarly, we both see our own experiences of death reflected in Didion's play and McKenna's performance and catch a glimpse of a place we hope never to go.

The Year of Magical Thinking