Just found out that Vanessa Redgrave finally got married to her long time companion, Italian actor Franco Nero (and father of her son, Carlo), late last year. The simple ceremony was attended by immerdiate family members and close friends.
Theater Review
A gripping stage of grief
Vanessa Redgrave gives body and voice to Joan Didion's
'The Year of Magical Thinking'
By JOE DZIEMIANOWICZ
DAILY NEWS THEATER CRITIC
Posted Friday, March 30th 2007, 4:00 AM
Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave avoids showy displays of grief in the theatrical adaptation of Joan Didion's meditation on mourning, 'The Year of Magical Thinking.'
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"The Year of Magical Thinking"
Through June 30 at the Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St. Tickets: $76.25-$96.25 (212) 239-6200.
There are four or five actresses who could sit in a chair for 90 minutes talking about death and its aftershocks and have you hanging on every word. Vanessa Redgrave is one of them, and we're lucky to have her back on Broadway in the new play "The Year of Magical Thinking."
It matters, of course, that the words she's saying have been painstakingly crafted by Joan Didion, who adapted them, in large part, from her acclaimed memoir of the same title. Few authors are keener observers or more eloquent storytellers than Didion, whose career spans journalism, movies and books. This time out Didion turns her powers on her unvarnished self.
With this actress portraying this writer, "The Year of Magical Thinking," which opened yesterday at the Booth, is a theatrical experience you will never forget.
The monologue follows the 2003 death of Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne. The other part of the play, not covered so extensively in the memoir, is about their daughter, Quintana, who was in a coma when her father died. She died shortly after the book came out in 2005.
The play is filled with sharp insights, images that are both beautiful and awful, and generous doses of humor. What makes it so special is Didion's capacity and talent to take you through the tricks of the mind when it comes to grief. Magical thinking refers to Didion's belief, as crazy as it sounds, that if she did the right things (not getting rid of Dunne's shoes, for example) or thought the right thoughts (can't drive up that street), she could reverse the reality of the deaths.
British playwright and director David Hare stages the production simply, focusing squarely on the words and the performance and immediately making the audience part of the story. "It will happen to you," we hear in the opening minute. "That's why I'm here."
The set (by Bob Crowley, with lighting by Jean Kalman) is a bare stage, save for a wooden chair in front of fabric backdrops that periodically fall - with a whoosh - and vanish into the floor. The character is left amid an ever-expanding void. The metaphor is clear and stirring.
There is a picture in the Playbill of Didion alongside Redgrave. It's an unlikely match: Didion is tiny, fragile, sparrowlike; Redgrave is tall, sturdy, a falcon. The Oscar winner, using an American accent, avoids showy displays of emotion. There are a few yelps of anguish, heightening the story's impact, but she mostly speaks in a hushed manner that proves captivating.
The play isn't 100% successful. Toward the end, Redgrave as Didion rises from the chair and reads from the original book. It's a strange moment, as if we'd left the theater and had moved to a Barnes & Noble. Shortly after, she recalls being asked if chronicling her experience was comforting. Instead of a straight answer, she refers to geology. The character recollects images and events with crystal clarity - she even spells the name of a drug - but can be evasive and remote about feelings.
Those are, however, minor complaints about a play that is as intensely intimate as it is universal.
Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway
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'Magical Thinking' opens artistic doors
By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY 3/22/07
NEW YORK The celebrated author Joan Didion is tiny and soft-spoken and can seem timid when you meet her in person. The celebrated actress Vanessa Redgrave is tall and imposing with a presence so powerful it reverberates through a trans-Atlantic phone call.
Yet in Didion's new stage adaptation of her acclaimed memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which opens March 29 at Broadway's Booth Theatre, Redgrave portrays the writer. Well, sort of.
"I don't see myself as playing Joan," says Redgrave, 70. "I'm playing a very specific woman who has gone through very specific circumstances. I've learned, having read an awful lot of what Joan's written and what others have written and how they talk about writing that writers think differently. I'd always thought, fiction is fiction and non-fiction is non-fiction. But life isn't like that, and neither is writing."
Apparently not, judging by Didion's own description of the character who shares her name.
"It's me, and it's not me," says the 72-year-old first-time playwright, perched on a sofa in her warm, spacious living room. "It's always you and someone different. But in the play, the character is more specifically a character; in the book, the character is more me talking."
That Didion would refer to the voice in her original work as a character at all might seem surprising. Written after the death of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne, who had a heart attack in 2003 just short of the couple's 40th anniversary, and days after their only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, lapsed into a coma after a case of pneumonia led to septic shock, the book is a first-person account of Didion's attempts to come to terms with the loss of her partner in life and art.
Quintana, whose dramatic ups and downs are chronicled with the same unflinching candor as Didion's difficult adjustment to widowhood, died at 39 in 2005 after the book was completed. The one-woman play gave Didion an opportunity to address this second profound loss while examining the first from "a different place. I wasn't really revisiting it, though, because I had never left it. It's part of who I've become."
Becoming a playwright wasn't a task that Didion instantly embraced, despite her string of successes as a novelist, essayist and screenwriter. When producer Scott Rudin approached her not long after Quintana's death, she was wary. But by the time director David Hare, principally a writer himself, came on board, "it seemed that the very fact I had never done a play was a good reason to try. And it's been exhilarating."
Redgrave, a longtime fan, is glad Didion made the leap.
"It's not similar to anything I've read, this text," the actress says. "The thinking is on the level of a very advanced kind of computer imaging. I think Joan's husband had a similar quality; they're distinctly different, of course, but I've glimpsed something of the same kind of high-tech precision and complexity of the mind."
Didion says turning a series of deeply internal recollections into a dramatic text proved enlightening. "In the course of finding the character, I discovered some things about myself, like, maybe I'm a little more interested in control than I had thought."
With opening night approaching, though, Didion is plainly grateful for the other sets of hands contributing to the production. "I'm anxious about it. Here's the thing: I'm sure Vanessa will be fantastic, and David couldn't be better. So if it doesn't work, it's my fault."
Redgrave begs to differ. "I'm nervous of doing her justice! My attitude is, I need this play as much as anyone who's bought a ticket. And the fact that the book was a best seller shows that an awful lot of people feel they need to hear what Joan has written."
By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY 3/22/07
NEW YORK The celebrated author Joan Didion is tiny and soft-spoken and can seem timid when you meet her in person. The celebrated actress Vanessa Redgrave is tall and imposing with a presence so powerful it reverberates through a trans-Atlantic phone call.
Yet in Didion's new stage adaptation of her acclaimed memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which opens March 29 at Broadway's Booth Theatre, Redgrave portrays the writer. Well, sort of.
"I don't see myself as playing Joan," says Redgrave, 70. "I'm playing a very specific woman who has gone through very specific circumstances. I've learned, having read an awful lot of what Joan's written and what others have written and how they talk about writing that writers think differently. I'd always thought, fiction is fiction and non-fiction is non-fiction. But life isn't like that, and neither is writing."
Apparently not, judging by Didion's own description of the character who shares her name.
"It's me, and it's not me," says the 72-year-old first-time playwright, perched on a sofa in her warm, spacious living room. "It's always you and someone different. But in the play, the character is more specifically a character; in the book, the character is more me talking."
That Didion would refer to the voice in her original work as a character at all might seem surprising. Written after the death of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne, who had a heart attack in 2003 just short of the couple's 40th anniversary, and days after their only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, lapsed into a coma after a case of pneumonia led to septic shock, the book is a first-person account of Didion's attempts to come to terms with the loss of her partner in life and art.
Quintana, whose dramatic ups and downs are chronicled with the same unflinching candor as Didion's difficult adjustment to widowhood, died at 39 in 2005 after the book was completed. The one-woman play gave Didion an opportunity to address this second profound loss while examining the first from "a different place. I wasn't really revisiting it, though, because I had never left it. It's part of who I've become."
Becoming a playwright wasn't a task that Didion instantly embraced, despite her string of successes as a novelist, essayist and screenwriter. When producer Scott Rudin approached her not long after Quintana's death, she was wary. But by the time director David Hare, principally a writer himself, came on board, "it seemed that the very fact I had never done a play was a good reason to try. And it's been exhilarating."
Redgrave, a longtime fan, is glad Didion made the leap.
"It's not similar to anything I've read, this text," the actress says. "The thinking is on the level of a very advanced kind of computer imaging. I think Joan's husband had a similar quality; they're distinctly different, of course, but I've glimpsed something of the same kind of high-tech precision and complexity of the mind."
Didion says turning a series of deeply internal recollections into a dramatic text proved enlightening. "In the course of finding the character, I discovered some things about myself, like, maybe I'm a little more interested in control than I had thought."
With opening night approaching, though, Didion is plainly grateful for the other sets of hands contributing to the production. "I'm anxious about it. Here's the thing: I'm sure Vanessa will be fantastic, and David couldn't be better. So if it doesn't work, it's my fault."
Redgrave begs to differ. "I'm nervous of doing her justice! My attitude is, I need this play as much as anyone who's bought a ticket. And the fact that the book was a best seller shows that an awful lot of people feel they need to hear what Joan has written."