Magical Thinking Makes Way for Maggie the Cat

"The Year of Magical Thinking:" Mad with Grief

Written by Joan Didion; directed by Eric C. Engel; scenic design by Matthew Whiton; costume design by Mallory Frers; lighting design by Shawn E. Boyle

Featuring Nancy E. Carroll as Joan Didion

Performances: Ended January 31; next up is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, February 13 through March 14, Lyric Stage, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston, Mass.
Box Office: 617-585-5678 or www.lyricstage.com

Writer Joan Didion's eloquent autobiographical play about the year in which both her husband, writer John Dunne, and their adopted daughter, Quintana, died unexpectedly is one woman's harrowing journey through the murky shoals of mind-altering grief. Chronicling in very intimate terms the steps from denial to acceptance that have often been clinically explained and analyzed by various psychiatrists and psychologists, The Year of Magical Thinking reveals the somewhat crazed twists and turns Didion's thought processes underwent as she struggled to come to terms with profound, heart-numbing loss.

Estimable Boston actress Nancy E. Carroll is a paradox of thought and feeling as Didion, her face revealing the deep, pained emotions that her cool, detached words can't directly express. Both narrator and subject, Carroll slips almost imperceptibly between objective storytelling and in-the-moment experiencing. She captures both the hazy distance that our minds put between us and trauma and the immediacy of reliving salient moments as if suddenly aware of them for the first time.

More memoir than play, The Year of Magical Thinking doesn't always engage the heart as deftly as it does the mind. We are entranced more by the poetry and sincerity of the writing than the power of the events at hand. When Carroll gradually sheds Didion's pragmatic and sarcastic defenses to deliver the achingly simple calm of acceptance, however, the piece finally becomes a work of magical theater.

Opening February 13 and running through March 14, the Lyric Stage's upcoming production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" marks the return to the stage of the company's producing artistic director, Spiro Veloudos. Appearing in the role of Big Daddy, Veloudos seems born for the part. The talented and award-winning Scott Edmiston directs.

PHOTO: Nancy E. Carroll as Joan Didion