Benefit Performances of YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING Starring Kathleen Chalfant to Take Place in January
Funds raised from the event underwrite Keen Company’s 23rd Season including two Off-Broadway productions, the Keen Playwrights Lab and more.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Dec. 16, 2022
Keen Company will present two benefit performances of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking starring Obie and Drama Desk Award-winner Kathleen Chalfant in a moving one-woman tour de force. Adapted from her best-selling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking recounts Didion's journey of loss, perseverance, and ultimately hope, using her signature wit to draw an intimate portrait of the resilience of the human heart. Benefit performances will take place on January 10 and 17 at 7pm at The Players Club, located at 16 Gramercy Park South in Manhattan. Tickets are currently on sale at www.keencompany.org/theyearofmagicalthinkingbenefit.
Conceived and directed by Artistic Director Jonathan Silverstein, Keen Company's original sold-out run, took place during October - November, 2022, in over 25 non-traditional theater spaces including living rooms, libraries, and other community centers throughout New York City.
Funds raised from the event underwrite Keen Company's 23rd Season including two Off-Broadway productions, the Keen Playwrights Lab fostering mid-career writers, its Keen Teens program providing free theater education to students in all five boroughs of NYC, and the commissioning and development of a new musical by Adam Gwon.
Benefit performances take place at the historic Players Club, a private social club founded in New York City by the noted 19th-century Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. In 1888, Booth purchased an 1847 mansion at 16 Gramercy Park, reserved an upper floor for his residence, and turned the rest into a clubhouse. The clubhouse was named a National Historic Landmark in 1963 and is the oldest New York City membership club still in its original home.
The creative team for The Year of Magical Thinking includes Jennifer Paar (costume design), Anshuman Bhatia (lighting design), Corinne Woods (line producer), and Arthur Atkinson (stage manager). The running time is 90 minutes with no intermission.
Please visit www.keencompany.org/theyearofmagicalthinkingbenefit for more information on the production.
About the Artists
Kathleen Chalfant
In a career spanning more than five decades, Kathleen Chalfant's performances on stage, screen, and television have garnered her praise and acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Perhaps best known for her shattering portrayal of Vivian Bearing, a scholar battling cancer, in Wit, she received the Obie, the Drama Desk, the Lucille Lortel, the Outer Critics Circle, the Ovation, Connecticut Critics Circle, the Garland, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for her work. BROADWAY: Angels in America (Tony and Drama Desk nom.), Racing Demon, Dance With Me. OFF-BROADWAY: A Woman of the World, Wit (Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, Connecticut Critics Circle, Obie Awards), For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, A Walk in the Woods (Drama Desk nom.), Tales from Red Vienna, Miss Ovington & Dr. Dubois, Talking Heads (Obie Award), Dead Man's Cell Phone, Nine Armenians (Drama Desk nomination), Henry V (Callaway Award).
Joan Didion
Born in California and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Joan Didion (1934-2021) spent her adult life in New York and Los Angeles. Winner of the 2005 National Book Award, The Year of Magical Thinking is one of 13 books by Joan Didion. Her other books include Play It As It Lays, Democracy, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, and Political Fictions. With her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she wrote the screenplays for such pictures as The Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino, True Confessions with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand, and Up Close & Personal with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded her its 2005 Gold Medal in nonfiction. She also received the 1996 Edward MacDowell Medal, the 1999 Columbia Journalism Award, and the 2002 George Polk Book Award. She contributed to various periodicals, most frequently The New York Review of Books.
Jonathan Silverstein
Jonathan Silverstein's work as Keen Company Artistic Director: This Space Between Us, Hear/Now: LIVE!, 1993, Molly Sweeney, Ordinary Days, Later Life, Lonely Planet, When It's You, Tick, Tick...Boom!, Travels With My Aunt, John & Jen, Middle of the Night, The Film Society, The Old Boy, Marry Me a Little. Also with Keen: Lemon Sky, The Dining Room (Drama Desk Award: Outstanding Ensemble), I Never Sang For My Father, Tea and Sympathy, and The Hasty Heart. Selected Off-Broadway: The Temperamentals (Drama Desk Award: Outstanding Ensemble), Red Herring (FringeNYC; Outstanding Direction Award), Blueprint (Summer Play Festival), and The Train Play (Clubbed Thumb). Regional: Buck's County, Huntington, Old Globe, Cleveland Play House, Merrimack Rep, Dorset Theatre Festival, Cape Rep Theatre. Alumnus, The Drama League Directors Project. MFA, UCSD. Member, SDC.
About Keen Company
Keen Company is a Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway company creating theater that connects. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, we celebrate the complexities of hope and the joys of the human condition. Keen also fosters mid-career playwrights through our Keen Playwrights Lab and mentors students from all five boroughs of NYC through our Keen Teens education program. In everything we do, Keen Company thrives through our welcoming ethos and community commitments. www.keencompany.org
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