Review:

One-woman show remarkable, despite technical glitches

Occasionally there are delicious, magical moments in a play.

One is the rare space in time when you actually forget you’re watching a play. Instead, you think you are listening to a person tell their story.

A friend, perhaps.

Such was the case with Seana McKenna’s performance in Belfry Theatre’s The Year of Magical Thinking. For 90 minutes, without intermission but with a recalcitrant lighting system, McKenna was Joan Didion in this memoir-as-one-woman-play directed by Michael Shamata.

On a basic black stage with just a chair, side table, and water glass to accompany her, McKenna renders a remarkable monologue recounting the year Didion lost both her husband and only child.

“And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you,” McKenna as Didion tells the audience.

Didion’s husband keels over as the couple sits down to dinner at the end of a hard day. They had visited their daughter, Quintana, who had been in the hospital for months.

Although her daughter recovers enough to appear to be on the road to recovery, she dies a startlingly young death that same year.

Grief is not a straight line, Didion discovers, as all her coping rituals fail. Keeping her husband’s shoes does not bring him back. Telling her daughter she is safe does not make it so. Grief is also an unkind mirror, reflecting our guilt at our inability to save those we most love.

Through the script, Didion picks at ferocious memories, her husband admonishing: “Must you always be right. For once in your life let it go.”

McKenna is, quite simply, perfect. Not only does she look like a younger Didion, she nails the author and playwright’s cultured, affected, and self-deprecating voice, gestures, body language and walk.

McKenna also did not miss a beat when the Belfry’s stage lighting system, after a series of seizure-like episodes, went dark. Delivering the remainder of the performance under working lights, however, meant for an even more intense rendering, as McKenna could now look an audience member in the eye. There was no place to look away from the palpable grief transmitted.

The Year of Magical Thinking is not a downer play, however.

It leaves the audience member with a profound respect for the faltering resilience Didion tried to build and likely still maintains. Grief and regret, like scars on skin, don’t disappear but remain tender to the touch for years on end.

Tickets are $23 to $38, available at the Belfry box office, 1291 Gladstone Ave. or 250-385-6815. Call for show times.

vmoreau@saanichnews.com