The Patterns of Grief: The Year of Magical Thinking

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THE JACKSON POLLOCK painting hanging on the back wall turns out to be the key to "The Year of Magical Thinking."

What originally looks like typical set dressing for an elegant New York apartment is puzzling at first. After all, Pollock's abstract, paint-splattered canvasses mean something different to each person who sees them.

And there's no doubt about what "The Year of Magical Thinking" means.

The one-woman play, based on the memoir of the same name, is a first-person account by essayist Joan Didion of the sudden deaths of her husband and daughter. Well, perhaps it is less about their deaths and more about the ways we cope with unimaginable grief, the tiny lies that we invent to stave off true mourning.

Helen Hedman carries the show on her tiny, squared shoulders, exactly embodying the Joan Didion we know from her essays and books.

She's smart, observant, a brilliant writer and speaker. Nothing gets past her or her enormous bug-eye sunglasses. Didion's writing is, as it ever was, sharp and spare.

Somehow, she makes it clear that her extraordinary life and grief are universal. "It will happen to you," she says, and it's not a malicious prediction, but an admonishment: Prepare yourself, she seems to say. You, too, will experience this chaotic, terrible grief.

And that Pollack on the wall? It reminds us that each of us is capable of finding meaning in that chaos, whether it truly exists or not.

» Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW; through July 12, $41-$61; 202-332-3300. (Dupont Circle)

Photo courtesy Carol Pratt