Employing Magical Thinking to Get Past the Crushing Loss of Loved Ones at Main Street Theater

It’s a play about grief that’s unsentimental and easy to absorb and so personal. That’s how Pamela Vogel describes The Year of Magical Thinking about to open at Main Street Theater.

Based on the National Book Award winning book of the same title by renowned author Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, The White Album) the play relates Didion’s feelings as they are happening as her husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly and her daughter is seriously ill and hospitalized.

Her daughter Quintana Roo would die before the book was published at age 39. Unlike the book, her daughter’s death is included in the play.

Vogel, who is just coming off a strong leading role in Swing Shift at 4th Wall Theatre Co., didn’t hesitate to take on another demanding role so quickly. “I’m really thrilled to step into the role and asked to take it on. I was very lucky,” Vogel says.

Didion herself transformed her book into a play. Vogel is the only person on stage throughout the one-act which is directed by Main Street’s Artistic Director Rebecca Greene Udden. “We have this character Joan actively telling her story. It’s not a memory play. She’s telling me this right now. She’s just stepped into a space where you can imagine one or a hundred are listening. It doesn’t matter. It’s very personal.”

Vogel took a deep dive into Didion’s writing and the author herself. “I read Play It As It Lays. And then there’s a documentary on Netflix that was put together by Griffin Dunne [nephew of John Gregory Dunne and Didion]. So I had done this deep dive. Into her. I came prepared to look at her condensation of her own work, It’s not like she shortened it. She just made it theatrical.”

Asked if she’d ever experienced a loss like Didion had, Vogel responds:

“To lose two family members in the same span of time is very hard. I would say in our own country, in our own world, there’s probably more people close to us who have lost people in the last two, three years.  whether it be COVID or these natural disasters. My mother is in a very fire part of the country and here I am in a very flood part of the country. And we both have people who have experienced trauma. And we have family members who’ve been displaced. So that kind of elevated trauma is in my life. But the death of two family members, no. But it’s certainly relatable.

“She talks about how life changes in the instant, in the ordinary instant. I think her point in the ordinary. She doesn’t come from a place of fear. She’s resting and is in a place of stability and gets rocked,” Vogel says. “‘This will happen to you. It happened to me’ is her opening. The money doesn’t protect you. The fame doesn’t protect you. We’re all so vulnerable.

“How lovely to love and be loved. But the excruciating loss is so huge that it cannot be escaped. And somehow we survive through it. She looks for ways to survive in her magical thinking. And during the course of the evening she lets go of that. You think it’s going to be how she pretends her way out. But no, she uses magical thinking to go into it and come out. So all of that is a journey through something, not a memory of something that already happened and I solved.”

Asked why she wanted to do the role, Vogel says:

“Because the character is so wise. It’s gift for me as an actor to play someone that wise. I love being able to speak so that the audience receives it. You can’t talk at the audience. You have to speak so that you give it away.  It’s a very exquisitely written way of doing that. Your experience is successful when you see that people are understanding.

“It’s not meant to be a therapy session;.it’s’ a character that we watch,” Vogel says. “She moves around the stage, lots of standing and walking through. It’s movement in order to reach the audience.” Vogel wants people to know that the play also is funny. “She’s dry, entertaining. how could this be but it is.

“This is really going to grip you and will be beautifully staged to manifest all those things. It’s aggressive; Joan Didion was aggressive as a writer  I love it, as a woman. How do we step into clarity and demand and our own protection and our own opinion expressed instead of not expressed and sharing in a way. Yes it’s teaching but it’s not. It’s not that sort of motherly thing where I’m going to teach you a lesson. She’s going through something.”

Performances are scheduled for October 19 through November 17 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays at Main Street Theatre – Rice Village, 2540 Times Boulevard. For more information, call  713-524-6706 or visit mainstreettheater.com. $45-$64.