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Vanessa Redgrave to Star in The Year of Magical Thinking

By: May. 26, 2006
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Tony Award-winner Vanessa Redgrave will star in the Broadway-bound stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's bestselling memoir of loss, grief and healing, according to the New York Times.

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According to the article, Redgrave was the only actress considered for the show, which will be a one-woman play adapted by Didion from her book. Produced by Scott Rudin and helmed by David Hare (author of Stuff Happens, Amy's View, upcoming The Vertical Hour), The Year of Magical Thinking will open at the Booth Theatre on March 29th, 2007. It was Rudin who originated the idea of bringing the book to the stage as a long monologue. The stage version will differ from book in some ways, as it will cover some events that happened after Magical Thinking's publication.

Didion is currently "writing and rewriting" the script, and is on her 10th draft. Didion expects the final draft to be completed by the summer. A workshop of early material was held this spring.

Publishers' notes on The Year of Magical Thinking state: "From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the 'weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.'"

A member of the acclaimed theatrical dynasty that also includes her late father Michael and her sister Lynn, the British-born Redgrave received a Tony Award for her performance in A Long Day's Journey Into Night. She had previously appeared on Broadway in Orpheus Descending and The Lady from the Sea, as well as having appeared in a number of shows in the West End; she recently appeared at the Kennedy Center in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hecuba. An Academy Award-winner for Julia, she also garnered nods for her performances in the films Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Isadora, Mary, Queen of Scots, The Bostonians, and Howard's End.

Didion is one of America's most acclaimed writers, having worked as a journalist, essayist novelist and screenwriter. Her novels include Play It As It Lays and Run River, her books of essays include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and screenplays (written in collaboration with Dunne) include Panic in Needle Park, A Star is Born and Up Close and Personal.


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