Curtain Call: Joan Didion

We know, we know, another post about Joan "J.Diddy" Didion. Sue us. We love the petite lady of letters, and besides, she's just published an essay in the Times describing her experience transforming her elegant tome of grief--The Year of Magical Thinking--into a Broadway play.

Not only does Didion wax incisive on her debut as a playwright, she offers a charming remembrance to her girlhood, when she had the desire to be an actress. It's a bit of biography she'd acknowledged in her essays, but here we get a deeper glimpse into Didion the stagestruck girl whose acting career begins and ends with one audition.

I had spent uncounted hours pretending to do homework while I listened to the plays the Theatre Guild did on the radio. I had torn “Death of a Salesman” out of Theatre Arts and memorized Mildred Dunnock’s graveside words to Willy. I could reliably reduce myself to blubber by doing Julie Harris's “we of me” lines from “The Member of the Wedding.” For less current repertory, I could go to the library and check out, say, Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude,” just one example that may suggest the determination with which I was improvising my own education. “Strange Interlude” in hand, I could retreat to a shed behind the house and do it, an all-day project, by and for myself.

It was now time, as I saw it, to move on. Skip high school, go straight to professional training.

In fact I wanted to go to New York, the American National Theater Academy, but since I could not visualize the scene in which my mother and father agree to send me alone to New York, I cannily substituted the less inflammatory Pasadena.

So heavily freighted was the day’s secret mission that I managed to convince myself that the recruiter would ask me to read Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Sotto voce, I summoned up a few lines, the showier ones. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.

The recruiter did not ask me to read Blanche DuBois.

The recruiter asked me how tall I was.

I said I was 5 foot 2, cheating by the same quarter-inch that I would eventually cheat on my driver’s license.

“Absolutely too short for the stage,” the recruiter said. “Although possibly you could aim for the cinema.”

Lacking even the presence of mind to mention the five-foot-nothing Helen Hayes, at the time widely described as “First Lady of the American Stage,” I could still see that something in this did not quite add up. I thanked the recruiter. I left the Pasadena Playhouse brochures she gave me (as if I did not have them, as if they were not hidden in a drawer with the playbill for “O Mistress Mine”!) in the lobby of the Senator. Once on the street I tried the plummy accent the recruiter had lent to “the cinema,” then stopped. I walked over to K Street in my good suit and went home, my life in the theater over.

Read the rest of the essay here.



The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic [NYT]
The Year of Magical Thinking [show site]