on May 27th, 2006Redgrave and Didion Broadway Bereavement
Ask a writer about rewriting and I doubt they’ll be able to utter more than a few sentences without immediately revising that which they’ve already said. There’s an art to getting the words to match the feeling behind them.
T.S. Eliot put two words together and said “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
Edgar Allan Poe never began a short story without first deciding on the emotion he wanted to evoke in the reader BEFORE he set words to page. He called it mixing an “emotional cocktail” or the notion that when the reader drank in his words they would feel the precise emotion he wanted them to feel after they had set down the story.
Joan Didion lost her husband to a heart attack and wrote a book about the aftermath. Now she’s adapting it into a play for Vanessa Redgrave to star in. Would a 20-year-old go see this play? I doubt it. But they should. It just might make them respect the brief lives we’ve all been given and yet take for granted until tragedy invades our happy smugness.
“The Year of Magical Thinking” will be the first play for Ms. Didion, 71. It will not be a strict adaptation of the book, she said, because it will cover events that happened after it was published. The book, an account of the fear, despair and exasperation of bereavement, begins on Dec. 30, 2003, with the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, after a heart attack at the dinner table.
Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion, Working on a Merger
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
New York Times, May 26, 2006
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion