The Year of Magical Thinking: “AN ELECTRIFYING PIECE OF THEATRE”

Stunning reviews of a stunning performance! Catherine Downes and The Year of Magical Thinking has received glowing appreciation from the critics …

Catherine Downes in The Year of Magical Thinking. Photo by  Stephen A'Court.

Didion’s “writing is heartfelt, it is also incredibly expressive and lyrical, a mark of the great writer that she is. However, as good as this is, it still needs to be brought to life on the stage and this where Susan Wilson’s production makes this into a superb piece of theatre.

The simple but effective set of Penny Angrick, Marcus McShane’s subtle but very evocative lighting design and Gareth Hobbs haunting music all add much to the quality of this production, but it is the stand-out performance of Catherine Downes that transcends this production into something special.

Solo performances often incorporate multiple characters.  Not so this play.  Catherine Downes is nobody but Joan Didion relating her year of magical thinking and how Downes does it is masterful.

From the moment she appears on stage with her opening lines, reticent, holding back, but powerfully seductive, the audience is drawn into her world where they stay for the duration of the production savouring Downes’ exquisite performance.

There are moments of emotion, beautifully handled by Downes, but for the most part this is a rational, sometimes even calculating, way of dealing with loss which Downes portrays with such confidence and ease. Consummate performer that she is, the strength, stamina and ability of someone to perform what is essentially a 90 minute monologue is quite extraordinary.

A must-see production for not only the writing but for Downes’ amazing performance.”

- Ewen Coleman, the Dominion Post

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Catherine Downes in The Year of Magical Thinking. Photo by  Stephen A'Court. 

“From the moment Downes appears, a spectre behind a semi-transparent screen bathed in ethereal blue light, she is the character left behind, the one still living. Downes’ face when she steps in front of the screen is one of a woman struggling to hold something back and wanting to release at the same time. “It will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you,” she says.

Written by American novelist and journalist Joan Didion after her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, die within two years of each other, the script is more fleet-footed, dynamic, and revealing of her personality than the two books on which it is based. Self-pity or sadness aren’t allowed to dominate one moment as she oscillates between clinical details of death and memories that make up so much of life. Humour also gets fair play. “It’s still early in Los Angeles. Is John even dead there yet?”

Downes isn’t Didion, but she fully inhabits her memories and all the ranges of emotions, so when she flashes back to a happy night in Honolulu and says, “I had such a sense of well-being I did not want to go to sleep,” it strikes a chord of joy as powerful as the knell of death.”

- Amanda Witherall, Capital Times

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“As the audience rises to applaud Catherine Downes' solo effort, the wonder of it is she has made her 90 minute marathon seem effortless: such is the centred fluency of her beautifully paced and modulated performance, directed by Susan Wilson.

All is perfectly pitched for the intimacy of Circa Two. We don't so much witness a performance as spend time with a very particular person who has a profound experience to share.  It is 90 minutes very well spent.”

- John Smythe, Theatreview

The Year of Magical Thinking is on until 8 September. To book, call the Circa Box Office at 801-7992 or go online at www.circa.co.nz.

JOAN DIDION and THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING.

Didion is one of America’s iconic writers and The Year of Magical Thinking is a stunning memoir of electric honesty and passion in which she explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

It is a remarkably moving examination of the year following her husband’s sudden death just before their fortieth anniversary that is filled with often surprising insights and more than a dash of humour. It is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the decade.

“Thrilling . . . a living, sharp, memorable book. . . . Sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.” - Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review

The book was published in 2005 – winning the US National Book Award. In 2006 Didion was persuaded to adapt the work for the stage and the resulting play opened on Broadway, New York in 2007 (directed by David Hare, starring Vanessa Redgrave).

Didion was born December 5, 1934, Sacramento, California. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently lives in
New York. For over forty years, Joan Didion has been widely renowned as one of the strongest, wittiest and most-acerbic voices in journalism, literature and film. With her sharp, idiosyncratic essays collected as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, she helped define both the New Journalism and Sixties America. Later, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, became some of the highest-paid screenwriters in Los Angeles (The Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, A Star is Born) – glamorous, well-connected and Hollywood’s mascots of the East Coast intelligentsia. Combined with the political reporting and fiction drawn from her experiences in Central America in the Eighties, Joan Didion emerged as the grande dame of American journalism. 

So, no one could have been more unnerved by her unraveling in the wake of a pair of tragedies than Didion herself — a fact she conveys brilliantly in The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicles an exceptionally unforgiving period in her life. Her recently married daughter Quintana had been stricken with pneumonia and fell into a coma. Only a week later, her husband and partner of 40-years died of a heart attack. Battered by these events, Didion felt her grip on reality suddenly slipping. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We know that someone close to us could die. We might expect to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect to be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy – cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” Quintana died in 2005, and Didion’s most recent book Blue Nights tells her story.

The Year of Magical Thinking  - an award-winning, best-selling memoir and a play of extraordinary perception and depth. It has touched the hearts of readers, audiences and critics:

“What has stayed with me the most these past few weeks is Didion's heartfelt portrait of her and Dunne's extraordinary love for each other, and their constant companionship, and respect, and friendship, which shine through all of her reminiscences of their four decades of marriage. Deepest love; deepest pain … quite possibly my favorite of the year.”  - Scott, New York

“magnificent … as moving as anything we are likely to encounter in a theatre this year.” - Daily Telegraph

The Year of Magical Thinking opens in Circa Two on 11 August and runs until 8 September. There will be a $25 preview on Friday, 10 August and a $25 Special on Sunday, 12 August. To book, please call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or go online www.circa.co.nz.