“The details will be different, but it will happen to you,” she says. “That’s what I’m here to tell you.”
The play is a report back from an emotional abyss, yet for all its intensity, it isn’t grim or overwrought. It’s rigorously self-scrutinizing, dryly self-mocking, fairly stunned — somehow both unsentimental and consumed with love.
Didion remembers her trauma-scrambled brain wanting to fend off an obituary for Dunne in The Los Angeles Times, because maybe on Pacific Time, he was still alive. She remembers “just playing along,” for quite a while, with the idea that he was dead.
What she doesn’t remember — like precisely when the ambulance arrived at their apartment, or how long the E.M.T.s stayed — she fills in with research, because this is the kind of person she is: a woman with a razor-sharp intellect who armors herself with knowledge. Someone seemingly too firmly in control to become unmoored.
Vivian Bearing, the dying professor in “Wit,” is that way, too, which is part of the brilliance of casting Chalfant here. She doesn’t physically resemble Didion, and she’s not attempting an impersonation. But her Didion has that same sharp cerebral quality and that same destabilized vulnerability, along with a subtle, charismatic warmth.
Didion, who died in December, wanted so badly to protect her little family. She couldn’t, but she could alert the rest of us.
“Life changes in the instant,” she says again. “The ordinary instant.”
The Year of Magical Thinking
Through Nov. 20 in various spaces around New York City (addresses will be shared with ticket holders on the morning of the performance); keencompany.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
