Joan Didion was someone whom I had long worshipped as a writer. However, we became friends and colleagues when David Hare and the producer Scott Rudin invited me to take the solo part of Joan herself in the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking. The book had been published in 2005, and David was planning to direct it as a play on Broadway.
He and his stage designer, Bob Crowley, presented a series of backdrops over a wooden deck and a wooden chair. The combination of David’s humanism and witty stage expertise and Joan’s humour and perception, along with sudden variants of abstract backdrops falling with a thud to the deck, provided a compelling subtext for Joan’s narrative, which I shared with the audience.
We performed it in New York in 2007 and the following year at the National Theatre in London.
