Los Angeles Theatre Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

“It will happen to you,” Judy Jean Berns informs the audience as she walks onto the Elephant Stage as Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, based on the famous author’s book. A lit white backstage wall is the canvass for her oxford grey cardigan layered over a lavender dress. Her silver hair is cropped and she wears a locket around her elegant neck.  With only a wicker rocking chair upholstered with floral cushions next to a small table holding a glass of water and a medical book, in her mild, but heightened voice, she has a story to tell.  She briefs us on every raw detail of what has just happened to her family, as if we have just walked into the emergency waiting room.  It's an environment which Didion controls, only after this autobiography had taken place years ago.  Her experience is pretty incredible: she lost her husband while her only child lay in coma, who, a short time later, also succumbed to death.  The writer takes the audience through her processing of the events, approaching situations clinically, as if she were describing a crime scene. She takes nothing for granted and everything at face value, looking for irrefutable proof in every nook and cranny for the truth of her situation. “Is a lie a story the hearer only disbelieves?” she questions. As she measures every little detail while revisiting elements from different periods of her life, she manipulates the facts as a coping mechanism to lead her through the unimaginable (when contemplating calling friends in California immediately after her husband had just passed in New York, she considers the notion that he may not be yet dead Pacific Standard Time). Her literal contemplations lead to many poignant observations, as she entertains her alternate reality while avoiding falling into a vortex. The upper-class liberal atheist's (?) sobering account serves as a cerebral answer to others who turn to religion or God in time of great tragedy. Berns’ compelling line-readings appropriately supplement the story of a woman whose life was ripped away from her in only the autumn of her life. You can find tickets here.