What happens when your universe becomes unmoored? The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's award-winning autobiographical examination of grief, arrives on Broadway this spring in one of the season's most anticipated events. Academy Award- and Tony-winner Vanessa Redgrave will portray the writer in Didion's stage adaptation of her exhilarating memoir, directed by Oscar-nominated playwright David Hare (The Hours).
Redgrave re-lives the unimaginable night when, as Didion's only child lay in a coma, her husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a massive coronary as they sat down to dinner in their New York apartment. In response, Didion found a safe harbor in "magical thinking," stunned that "life changes in the instant" and feeling an irrational certainty that her husband "will come back and need his shoes." Her story is both a love letter to her daughter, who died just before the book was published in 2005, and a tribute to an extraordinary marriage. The combination of Didion, Redgrave, Hare and Tony-winning designer Bob Crowley (The History Boys) is sure to produce theatrical magic.