Seana McKenna. Photo by David Cooper
The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
Starring Seana McKenna
Directed by Michael Shamata
Runs until December 12 @ Tarragon Theatre Mainspace
By Mira Shenker
Spending my Thursday night reviewing a play—what could be wrong with that? Before I entered the theatre, I knew little about the show. Only that it was a solo show deemed “best” by Toronto Life and starring Stratford Shakespeare Festival regular, Seana McKenna. After I sat in my seat, I got to reading the backgrounder. The play is based on Joan Didion’s memoir of the same name. It’s a first-person narrative about how Joan Didion survived the month of December 2003, when her daughter Quintana Roo suddenly went into a coma and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died in front of her due to a massive coronary.
Heavy. I was concerned. This was a 90-minute monologue about death and with no intermission.
McKenna stood for a long time without speaking when she first came out—this may have been at director Michael Shamata’s instruction, but it could also have been that she was just waiting for the sound of the CN train going past the Tarragon to stop so she could say her line. Either way, it worked amazingly well. The sound of the train carried me into that first few minutes before I was comfortable with McKenna as Didion—far better the cheesy piano riffs that were piped in every once in a while as a transition or for emotional effect.
McKenna starts out fairly stiff—this feels like a speech; she doesn’t come across as real. But it’s only when she cracks, just slightly, that you realize you need that initial stiffness to appreciate how completely she falls apart later in the play. At 30 minutes in, she had me.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s roadmap of grief. As a writer, I started out relating to her need for “correctness” and the way she experiences numbness and shock by wondering why the social worker she’s been assigned uses the word “fare” instead of “taxi.” But eventually, I wasn’t relating, I was just engaged.
The play itself lost steam for me near the 70-minute mark, but McKenna kept me interested—not caring; interested. She set up a tone that made me want to hear her talk about, essentially, nothing. I wouldn’t say I cared about the character, but I was interested in hearing McKenna continue to talk.
