HotReview.org Editor's
Picks
Shows Worth Seeing:
The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
Booth Theatre
222 W. 45th St.
Box office: 212-239-6200
Chances are, you have heard that the majestic Vanessa Redgrave
can’t pull off a convincing imitation of brittle Joan Didion
in Didion’s stage adaptation of her memoir of mourning,
The Year of Magical Thinking. Why so many have assumed
that this theatrical character must resemble its author is truly
a mystery. John Lahr, in The New Yorker, has been harshest,
suggesting that the basic exhibitionism of the theatrical occasion
vulgarizes Didion’s book. I urge HotReview.org
readers to see the show and keep their minds open. For reasons
I won’t speculate about, it has prompted a strange eruption
of anti-theatrical prejudice among some of New York’s most
prominent theater critics, who have seen it as sullying the book’s
presumably unalloyed sincerity. That is nonsense. The book’s
very existence was evidence of artistically alloyed sincerity
from the beginning; for one thing, it was a fascinating public
display of grief from a famously WASPish author whose reputation
rests on a powerfully self-possessed style.
Redgrave doesn’t try to channel Didion or even Didion’s
narrator but rather plays a character based on them, with a different,
equally plausible personality. This character is more forceful
and expansive than Didion’s narrator, but the two share
the essential steely journalistic impulse to profile themselves
at a time of crisis, documenting their day-to-day experiences
as precisely as possible, as if factuality itself might provide
succor. It’s true that the result is not emotionally overwhelming,
but that is true of the book as well. Both works are astonishing
spectacles of sobriety, candor and precision under duress, employing
seeming artlessness to probe beneath easy sentimentality. The
comfort of hard, clear vision is preferred to the deliverance
of tears. That may not be what some theatergoers want to see,
but it’s the play that’s there. It’s also, in
most important respects, faithful to the original.
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Frost/Nixon
By Peter Morgan
Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
242 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
If not for Frank Langella’s extraordinary performance as
Richard Nixon, Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon would
be a largely forgettable docudrama lacking the capacious vision
of a substantial historical play. The subject is the series of
televised interviews that British talk-show host David Frost conducted
with the ex-President in 1977, in which he apologized (sort of)
for Watergate. This incident surely counts as obscure for most
theatergoers nowadays, so its major implications need to be made
very plain and convincing. Morgan unfortunately settles for a
few tired truisms about the power of TV and our collective obsession
with superficial imagery; his regard for historical accuracy is
also spotty and casual. It’s Langella—supported impressively
by Michael Sheen, as Frost—who gives the production pith
and gravity. Langella plays Nixon not as a failure or clown but
rather as a deeply and slyly intelligent politician unthreatened
by Frost yet struggling with a kind of suicide drive. The fascinating
spectacle on view is an internal drama that Langella makes unforgettably
visible and palpable: Nixon deciding for himself whether he wants
to fade from public view or try clawing his way back to power
and influence. Forget the hunching, jaw-jutting and obvious bitterness
of Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s film Nixon.
Langella’s character is dignified and self-possessed, his
resentments and antipathies under clear control—except,
crucially, for his self-loathing. Watching this man turn decisively
and destructively inward is, strangely enough, one of the most
powerful dramatic climaxes of this Broadway season.
