Review: Aurora goes deep into grief in Joan Didion play

Joan Didion's memoir and play, "The Year of Magical Thinking," gets a powerful Bay Area premiere at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre.

Grief plays tricks on the mind, and journalist and novelist Joan Didion takes a sharply observed, detached and precise look at the strange places her thinking took her after the sudden death of her husband in her 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

Now Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company brings Didion’s story to life in the author’s own one-woman theatrical adaptation that premiered on Broadway in 2007.

A Sacramento native and UC Berkeley alumna living in New York, Didion chronicles her journey that began when husband John Gregory Dunne (an author in his own right who collaborated with Didion on several screenplays) died of a heart attack in their Manhattan home one night at the end of 2003, in the middle of a conversation with her. Making matters much, much worse, was that at the time the couple’s only daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized and in an induced coma with septic shock resulting from pneumonia.

Didion details the empty feeling of absence and the guilt and regret she felt over relatively small things, but she lingers in particular on the irrational feeling that if she could just get all the information and do all the right things they might be able to fix this, in some way undo her husband’s death.

Structured rather differently than the book of the same name, the play obviously covers much of the same ground and experiences. It’s addressed very much to the audience, as if she’s giving some kind of public talk, framed as a kind of warning that this is something you too will go through. The play also talks more about what happened with Quintana, which Didion subsequently explored in more detail in a follow-up memoir, 2011’s “Blue Nights.”

Fresh from starring in Central Works’ “The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective” at Aurora’s old digs in the Berkeley City Club, outstanding local actor Stacy Ross (Aurora’s “Leni” and “Gidion’s Knot”) plays Didion with a cool distance and a tendency to intellectualize her experiences.

Slowly pacing around Kent Dorsey’s eye-catching set of irregular step-like platforms as she talks, she only occasionally displays strong emotion, and even then in subtle ways such as speeding up her speech in controlled frustration.

There are some interesting parallels to be drawn between Didion here and the character Ross played a couple years ago in Symmetry Theatre Company’s production of Sharr White’s “The Other Place” at the Live Oak Theatre, about another brilliant woman working her way through the tricks her mind is playing on her. While the brain specialist in White’s play responds with a great deal of denial and defensive lashing out, Ross’ Didion is mild and contemplative, preoccupied but precise and candid almost to a fault.

Performed over 95 minutes with no intermission and few pauses, Didion’s tale unfolds at a steady, measured pace in the staging by director Nancy Carlin, also a veteran local actor recently seen in Aurora’s “The How and the Why” and “The Monster Builder.”

Cliff Caruthers’ sound design lends some dramatic emphasis with quiet underscoring and spare atmospheric sound effects to suggest some of the locations mentioned, while Kurt Landisman’s lighting likewise subtly supports the shifting moods of the story.

The subject is inherently a difficult one that doubtless may make audiences recall their own experiences of grief, especially when they’re fresh, but the author’s calm detachment blunts those feelings somewhat, keeping them at arm’s length.

Didion’s sometimes almost clinical attention to detail may occasionally even make one’s mind wander, despite Ross’ compelling portrayal, and maybe that too is appropriate in a way. The play is, after all, about all the tangents and dead ends and vortices the mind drifts into as one strives to make sense of unfathomable loss

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING’

By Joan Didion, presented by Aurora Theatre Company

Through: July 21

Where: Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley

Running time: 95 minutes, no intermission

Tickets: $35-$70; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org