If the theme of last week’s theater reviews could be summarized as “the playfulness is the thing,” this week’s two plays counter with the declaration that “the performance is the thing.” Which doesn’t mean the Aurora Fox production of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and the Cherry Creek Theatre’s two-hour-plus version of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” aren’t commanding plays, only that the anchoring performances demand special attention.
In one play, a woman of formidable intellect navigates two catastrophic losses. In the other, a woman of formidable frankness allows herself a glimmer of romantic feeling
Billie McBride portrays Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which she adapted from her 2007 memoir of the same title. There’s something chastising – maybe even threatening – in Didion’s early introduction to the events of the night of Dec. 30, 2003, when her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had a widow-making cardiac event.
“That may seem awhile ago, but it won’t when it happens to you,” she says with a faint smile that feels particular to McBride. “And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. And that’s what I’m here to tell you.” It should sound like a bridge to empathy, to a grief we’ll all experience at some point, and yet … .
The pair had just returned to their New York City apartment from Beth Israel hospital, where they were visiting their only child, Quintana Roo, who was in the ICU. She was 37 at the time.
A table and chair sit in a circle of sand. McBride’s Didion slips off her shoes before taking the stage. And when she takes a seat, from time to time her bare feet lightly touch or float above that sand. The furniture and the sand seem to speak to Didion and Dunne’s bi-coastal life. For many years, the duo was famously ensconced in Malibu, Calif. Dunne and daughter Quintana took their last breaths in New York hospitals.
It is not a long play, but it is exquisitely mindful of stillness and pace. Writers are often aware of that peculiar hush in motion. Didion, who died in December 2021, was a master. She left a trove of incisive essays and books full of the piercingly observed. With Dunne, she also wrote screenplays. So much thought. So many words. So much acute calm amid the vivid.
As hot as the desert wind blows in the writer’s first novel, “Play It as It Lays” (which gets a mention or two here), her intellect has often exhibited a cool precision that founds its articulation in a scalpel-sharp and gleaming prose. This is a memory play to be sure, but also a language-rich work about the rich inadequacies of words. In Didion’s wrestling bout of grief, knowing and remembering overlap but don’t necessarily march in sync. There are limits to control.
The magic of the title finds one of its most succinct formulations when Didion shares, “of course, I knew he was dead … . Yet I myself was in no way prepared to accept this news. There was a level on which I believed whatever had happened remained open to revision. That was why I needed to be alone. I needed to be alone so he could come back.” Anyone who has lost a dear one so unexpectedly knows that sense, that hope, that once the lesson of loss has been learned, fate will return that person.
McBride as Didion tells the audience how a hospital social worker introduced her to the attending physician who’d come to tell her that her husband John had died as a “pretty cool customer.” This detail, this phrase, struck her – they so often did.
Only a couple of weeks ago, the Aurora Fox’s Studio Theatre was the site of another one-performer show, “Acts of Faith.” The Fox’s back-to-back programming underscores what an inviting space this black box is for the intimacy of solo works of spare if evocative design. Here, scenic designer Brandon Philip Case, lighting designer Brett Maughan and sound designer Joseph Lamar create a subtle set that holds space for words. The light shifts subtly, mimicking the transitions in mood: a personal arc from realization to confusion and back again to insight and once more toward a kind of being stunned.
There’s something in McBride’s veteran technique and Christy Montour-Larson’s direction that shines an evincing light on Didion’s chilly intelligence. I saw the show years ago and now feel that, depending on the actor, it can tilt toward emotion – it is, after all, a Herculean wrestling with unfathomable grief – or an example of a beautiful mind tussling with and being rebuffed by ugly truths.
What happened to Didion in the two years the show covers is harrowing, but her account encases it in an armor that won’t exactly let it be heartbreaking – at least in this production. It lives in that clear and dulled space of getting by, of taking care of the details, of — in Didion’s case — being present to her daughter’s upended life.
Quintana rallies, then falls ill again. Though her first memoir was finished before Quintana’s death, the play incorporates it. (Didion wrote more about her daughter in 2011’s “Blue Nights.”) The deaths of husband and child are emotionally unimaginable. “The Year of Magical Thinking” is about revising but also coming to accept (like the prayer of serenity at best) that which cannot really be revised or reversed, except perhaps in the telling and retelling.
For a brief and luminous night
Josie Hogan, the gravitational force in Eugene O’Neill’s wrecked romantic drama “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” is this week’s theatrical wonder. Emily Paton Davies’ finely calibrated performance presents a woman tempered by hardship and intuition but also willing for a brief spell to imagine love. That O’Neill brought the daughter of Phil Hogan — a calloused Irish farmer who’s run his sons off the Connecticut property he rents — to life nearly 80 years ago just goes to show which stories can endure.
And endure it does, in Cherry Creek Theatre’s handsome production directed by Tara Falk. An actor herself (terrifically memorable in “Sweat” at the Denver Center), Falk has assembled a sturdy cast. And by sturdy, I mean built with a love of craft, and built to withstand the jolts of O’Neill’s misdirection. “Who is lying to whom?” is a question that hovers over the action. Which feelings are true? Will friendship and fondness be honored?
Kendall is good at bluster, blarney and contrition, all qualities he’ll tap into as Phil starts to believe that his landlord and drinking buddy Jim Tyrone (Cajardo Lindsey) really plans to go back on his promise to sell the farm to him. Fearing this, Phil enlists Josie in a seduction. At first, she doesn’t believe that Jim would betray his world — and then she does.
There is not a lot of trust among these at-times-scheming, always-wounded characters. Jim keeps telling Phil that he plans to sell the property to a blowhard neighbor in jodhpurs. Christopher Robin Donaldson plays the gent, T. Steadman Harder, with humorous pomp. He also begins the play as Mike, the last Hogan son to escape his father, leaving his sister with a speech of out-the-door piety that brands him a budding hypocrite.
As Jim, an actor on a bender and a Broadway hiatus (a character based on O’Neill’s older brother Jamie, who drank himself to death), Lindsey performs the verbal loop de loops of a sauced and confessional drunk. He tells Josie that when his mother died, he engaged the services of a prostitute whom he speaks of with deep and slurry scorn. Much of the contempt is shaped by his shame. In fits and starts, he seeks the succor of a Josie, whose virtue he places on a pedestal. Contrary to her protestations, Jim makes Josie the virgin to the whore that bedevils his increasing delirium tremors.
There is something specifically fascinating about Davies’ embodiment of this character who is known about town as a tramp. How Phil and Josie banter about her reputation (as well as his) is a point of humor but also a sign of their understanding of and affection for each other.
Josie is transparent with Jim about her carnal liaisons, but Jim can’t hear it. He’s too invested in her purity. For her part, Josie sees a glimmer of possibility in his affection, in the two of them being tarnished souls together. Will a night of bonded bourbon — so rare during Prohibition, when the play is set — and authentic feeling give this misbegotten pair more than a moon? That audiences can entertain that question and hope reveals the tenderness of Davies’ performance and the terrific compassion in O’Neill’s final, complete work.
IF YOU GO
“The Year of Magical Thinking”: Written by Joan Didion. Directed by Christy Montour-Larson. Featuring Billie McBride. At the Aurora Fox Arts Center’s Studio Theatre, 9900 E. Colfax Ave, Aurora. Through Feb. 26. aurorafoxartscenter.org or 303-739-1970
“A Moon for the Misbegotten”: Written by Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Tara Falk. Featuring Emily Paton Davies, Christopher Robin Donaldson, Chris Kendall and Cajardo Lindsey. At the Pluss Theatre at the Mizel Arts and Cultural Center, 350 S. Dahlia. Through Feb. 26. cherrycreektheatre.org or 303-800-6578
