County Roads Theatre is the brainchild of actress Joan McBride and her husband, producer Charles Morris, who are dedicated to offering “intimate, professional theatre in the County.”

Since 2017 the company has mounted three productions for one or two actors, all directed by Fred Robinson. The Year of Magical Thinking, their fourth, is a one-woman play acted and directed by Ms. McBride.

With years of professional acting experience, the actor brings an intensity and dedication to the stage. “Live theatre is a transportive experience in a more immediate way than reading a book. It involves risk for both actor and audience.” 

This year’s production attests this statement.

Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir takes on the most difficult of subjects: the unexpected loss of a loved one. While Didion’s daughter was in a coma in hospital, her husband suffered a fatal heart attack. “Life changes fast,” she writes. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

The book does not tell the story of either the husband or the daughter. It is an effort to account for Didion’s own experience. “Magical thinking” names the irrational process of surprise, grief, and the struggle to accept of the loss of her husband and her daughter’s extreme illness. It is an intense meditation and self-analysis, and struggles with “the question of self-pity.” Didion examines with a rational, analytic attention, seeking to explain her behaviour both from within and without. How did she appear to others? How did her primal, inner desire to deny the truth, this “magical thinking,” first appear?

In 2007, Didion transformed the book into a one-woman play, which debuted with actor Vanessa Redgrave. The play transforms the memoir, taking it much further. In addition to taking up the grief, guilt and self-pity over her husband’s death, it wrestles with the death of Didion’s daughter, which occurred shortly after the memoir was published. The memoir itself is an element in the play.

The stage version  translates the interior monologue of the memoir into something voiced, aware of an audience. Articulating, giving voice to feeling, is part of the process of grieving. It achieves a greater degree of calm and acceptance than the writing of the memoir.

“She says it’s the most challenging piece of theater she’s ever taken on partly because of the way it is so focused,” says Mr. Morris of Ms. McBride. “It really is just you and your delivery of the text and the audience.”

Ms. McBride is fascinated with the way Didion’s play brings out two voices:  the voice that advises and analyzes, and that which experiences the events and the emotions. “Didion has written about finding meaning in the rhythm of the words, but this experience showed her that was a technique for hiding from meaning, that it takes more than words to find meaning.” For Ms. McBride this calls for performance rather than private reading.

Bringing the play together involved an elaborate process. Ms. McBride researched every moment of the play: the context of its words in Didion’s life and writings, the spaces in which it takes place. That knowledge informs the apparently straightforward words spoken by the actor on a stage that features a single chair. She is alone, and yet carrying the weight of memories that come in different versions, including their “first draft” evasions, as well as fading images.

The theme Ms. McBride wants most to convey is that “grief is a companion on our journey through life. And once we recognize that, the next step is for us to find the courage to turn and accept that companion.” 

The rational awareness demonstrated in the memoir, the analysis of the denials of magical thinking, is a step along the way. But the acceptance that relieves the guilt does not come there. It is the play, which makes an address to a present audience, that opens the way.  

The play runs Thursday 26 September to Oct. 4. Tickets here.