T he 2006-2007 Broadway season has been blessed with an abundance of unforgettable, extraordinary performances by some of the stage’s most illustrious luminaries, as well as some rising stars and even some unknowns. Legendary Tony winners Vanessa Redgrave, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer, and Frank Langella are giving thrilling performances alongside Tony winner Liev Schrieber and England’s Eve Best and Michael Sheen. In this edition, we'll look at Redgrave's outstanding work this season.
This veteran actress is renowned for her intense and passionate performances. Whether she is Tennessee Williams’s sensual Italian Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending, the archetypal war victim Hecuba in the Greek tragedy, or the morphine-ravaged Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Redgrave usually throws herself into her roles, wearing her agony or her ecstasy on her magnificent face, in her expressive blue eyes and on her tall, graceful body – which makes her work in Joan Didion’s autobiographical play The Year Of Magical Thinking (at the Booth Theatre) such a revelation.
Redgrave, elegant in costume designer Ann Roth’s simple, neutral-toned loose top and long skirt, her silver-blonde hair tied back at the nape of her neck, sits quietly for most of the play and coolly recounts Didion’s wrenching year of emotional upheaval and grief: In December 2003 the writer’s beloved husband of four decades, the novelist and screenwriter John Griffin Dunne, keeled over at the dinner table with a fatal heart attack as she was fixing a salad for dinner. They had just returned from visiting their only daughter Quintana Roo, who was hospitalized with pneumonia and septic shock and would die of brain hemorrhage followed by pancreas failure later that year at 39. Novice playwright Didion has adapted her National Book Award winning best-selling intimate memoir about grief, mourning, and ultimately survival into a most moving and universal theatrical experience.
Director David Hare has elicited an unusually spare, minimalist performance from the usually volatile Redgrave. With no sentimental tugging at the heart strings, no theatrics, she simply confides Didion’s tale of emotional devastation and the “magical” coping strategies she employs to survive. Redgrave is mesmerizing. The slightest shift in tone, the slightest movement – suddenly standing after sitting so long – telegraphs that the character is losing some control over her carefully crafted narrative. The gesture of extending her arm with Quintana’s bracelet on her own wrist is enough to elicit gasps from the audience and will break your heart.
Redgrave and Didion insist that the tall commanding Redgrave is not impersonating or “playing” the petite ravaged looking Didion but rather a character Didion has created called the “speaker.” The speaker confides: “This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”
In future issues we'll take an in-depth look are more of these outstanding performances from a remarkable Broadway season.
