Vanessa Redgrave to Star in Year of Magical Thinking on B'way Next Spring

Vanessa Redgrave will star in a one-woman stage adaptation of Joan Didion's bestseller The Year of Magical Thinking. The show is set to open on March 29, 2007 at the Booth Theatre, according to The New York Times.

Redgrave, who has earned much acclaim and numerous awards on the London stage, has previously appeared on Broadway in The Lady from the Sea, Orpheus Descending and Long Day's Journey Into Night, for which she won a Tony Award. Her off-Broadway credits include Vita & Virginia and Anthony and Cleopatra. Last year she appeared on the New York stage as the title character in the Royal Shakespeare Company mounting of Hecuba, which ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She won an Oscar in 1978 for her supporting turn in Julia and has been nominated for five other Academy Awards for Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Isadora, Mary, Queen of Scots, The Bostonians and Howards End.

Didion, who has written numerous screenplays but never a stage play, wrote The Year of Magical Thinkin about a particularly devastating portion of her life. It details her feelings from the death of her husband and longtime collaborator, John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003. During that same period, their only child lay unconscious in a hospital after suffering septic shock. She died this August at the age of 39. The title The Year of Magical Thinking comes from Didion's feeling that Dunne's death propelled her into a state of thought she refers to as "magical thinking."

The Year of Magical Thinking was published by Knopf on October 4, 2005. Didion is adapting the work for the stage and will incorporate events that occurred after the book's publication. David Hare is set to direct.

The Booth Theatre is currently home to the limited engagement of Faith Healer, which is scheduled to close on August 13. After that, it will house a limited engagement of Butley, starring Nathan Lane, beginning at the venue on October 5.