LONG WHARF THEATRE PRESENTS A MOVING"THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING"

Tragedy doesn’t always give a warning when it is about to disrupt your life. Even if your partner has been ill for fourteen years, his death will still bea shock. The only way to prepare for these eventualities is to cherish every day, to balance the precious with the precarious, to feel gratitude for the moment and to live in the present…to not postpone joy.

Unthinkable things happen to people, even good people, like car crashes, chronic illnesses, and, the inevitable worst case scenario, death. Joan Didion, journalist, essayist and novelist, was all too familiar with the curses and tragedies of life as she received a double dose of devastation that was a painful reality in the two years from 2003 to 2005. Her husband and writing partner of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly and her daughter, Quintana Roo, 39, died after an extended illness.

>p>To work through her grief, Didion penned a book “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which won the National Book Award and which she adapted into a one woman play. From now until Sunday, December 10, Long Wharf Theatre will be presenting this personal, poignant and powerful tale starring the legendary Kathleen Chalfant.

Didion, who has been hailed as “the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today” by novelist and poet James Dickey, used the written word as therapy to try and understand what went wrong in her world. This is a cautionary tale, as she wanted the audience to be aware that what happened to her could happen to you.

When her novelist, screenwriter and literary critic husband died unexpectedly on December 30, 2003 of a heart attack, at the same moment her beloved daughter was in an induced coma suffering from septic shock, Didion found that life can change in an instant, that grief has its place but also its limits, and that the writer’s instincts to constantly “revise” work unfortunately don’t apply to life. She wanted a “do over,” a new ending, so that even as she went through the rituals of a funeral she was preparing for John to return. She couldn’t give away his shoes because he would need them when he came back.

In an intimate setting, as if she is talking directly to you, Kathleen Chalfant is wonderfully convincing as she takes you through that unimaginable time when she tried to “see it straight,” when the sea went silent, when she attempted to correct the reversible error. Artistic director, who conceived the show through Keen Company, Jonathan Silverstein keeps a taut and sensitive hold on the personal, intensely familiar and internal exploration of feelings.

For tickets (free for students, at libraries, pay-it-forward, up to $125 at individual homes), go online to longwharf.org/shows-events/the-year-of-magical-thinking/ for the play’s performance dates and locations in and around New Haven in homes, gathering spaces and libraries.

Learn how Joan Didion used “magical thinking” to survive a time when everyone of importance in her life was snatched away in an instant. That she survives is a testament to her strength and resilience.