Kathleen Turner (C. Stanley Photography/Arena Stage)

By DCist contributor Elena Goukassian

An understated set at Arena Stage invites the audience into a cozy apartment that holds only a couch, an armchair, a rug, a wall of books, a desk, a tea set, and a window. It’s the setting for an intimate production of The Year of Magical Thinking, based on author Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir of the same name.

The intimate set seems to promise great things, and Kathleen Turner, who plays Joan Didion, the one and only character to grace the stage during this almost two-hour-long production, delivers on that promise.

The play is a monologue, so nothing happens on stage: Didion paces, sits and stands, sips water and tea, looks out the window as the light changes, and time passes. Yet the performance is not only oddly captivating, but also meditative and profoundly emotional.

Didion, best known as a champion of literary journalism in the 1960s and 70s, wrote The Year of Magical Thinking after her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack in 2003. The loss sent Didion into a tailspin that was often accompanied by “magical thinking,” she explained in the 2005 book—she couldn’t bring herself to throw out his shoes, for example, because she felt he might need them when he came back. Two years later, Didion adapted her memoir for the stage.

A master of prose that reads like poetry, Didion has her stage character recite from memory many passages from her original book, which means Turner has lines that sound more like literature than actual human speech, like “the day began with the non-sequential inexorability of a dream.” Given the importance of exact phrasing and the deeply personal suffering it portrays, the play almost becomes a piece of endurance theater.

Turner has no problem delivering these literary mouthfuls with sincerity, taking the audience through all five stages of grief in excruciating detail—the obsession with the names of hospitals and dates, trying to be a “cool customer” with the nurses, reliving the same moments over and over.

There is a lot to learn from Didion about the power and loneliness of grief and how crazy it makes people feel. The Year of Magical Thinking may provide us with a deeper understanding of our own grief, as well as that of others, a complexity most of us would never be able to put into words.

Because its language seems unnatural at times, The Year of Magical Thinking may still work better as a book than in a theater. Still, Turner’s Didion could not have been more convincing.

The Year of Magical Thinking is at Arena Stage through November 20. Buy tickets here.