So last night Joi and I saw The Year of Magical Thinking, the Broadway version of Joan Didion’s memoir about her husband’s death and the year that followed. It blew me away. It might be the best thing I've seen on Broadway, along with I Am My Own Wife. It's devastating and beautiful, it's better than the book, and I think Vanessa Redgrave is not of this world. I saw her in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but not up close like this, and under these lights, all raw and bare on the stage. She’s so beautiful! This massive, otherworldly woman with glowing blue eyes and pale hair and this face that shifts in an instant. It’s just her for an hour and 40 minutes, talking to the audience under stark lights, in a white dress, with a series of dark screens behind her. I was completely under her spell. It reminded me of seeing the Stooges, actually, a few years ago: that night, too, I was tired and sort of wishing I was home instead of at this show, and the moment Iggy Pop came out, like a walking wound, astonishingly vulnerable, which I didn’t expect, so completely raw and open and ferocious and so palpably in pain, I found myself given over, completely hooked into him and in tears. Vanessa Redgrave was like that, just devastating and raw and open, like there’s no space between her grief and your own heart, it’s like this magical thing she does, taking you up into herself.

And the words! Joan Didion sort of stripped down her own book and redid it for the stage, and she includes the death of her daughter, too, since her daughter died after the book was published. And whereas the book is so clinical and ordered, or trying to be, and Joan Didion’s grief is like this weight pressing against the words but never breaking through them, the play offers all these cathartic moments and pauses and bursts of lyricism. And it’s funny! There’s a lot of humor and wryness and charm. She talks about her “magical thinking” that keeps making her believe, despite all reason, that her husband will come back to her if she does everything right, in this funny, self-deprecating way that’s run through with grief, so you are literally laughing with your heart breaking at the same time. And she breaks down and pulls herself together, cries out and then goes silent and resumes her story, and it’s just this whole journey through loss and every mood that accompanies it. Anyway, the whole place was under Vanessa Redgrave’s spell, and there was a huge standing ovation, and I cannot believe that we saw the 13th preview—the play doesn’t open until next week—of a play that hasn’t ever been performed before, never played outside of New York, and it was that perfect.

Look. Her face!