‘You start from a different place’

Joan Didion and Vanessa Redgrave could hardly be more different.

Didion’s a distinctly American writer, as soft-spoken as she is small. “Let’s face it,” she says, “everybody’s taller than I am.” Redgrave is a nearly 6-foot-tall British actress, as expressively forceful as she is physically imposing.

And yet when Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” is turned into a one-woman Broadway play, Redgrave will depict Didion on stage. Or is Redgrave actually playing someone else?

Even though Didion’s journal of grief and the new play share the same title, the two works are, in some ways, as different as Didion and Redgrave. Didion’s book, written after the 2003 heart attack death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is ultimately a chronicle of the slow healing of a deep psychic wound.

The play, conversely, isn’t dispassionately focused on finding answers in sorrow; it’s about the emotional implosion of a universe. After the book was published, Didion also lost her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, who died in August 2005 after a series of hospitalizations.

Writing “The Year of Magical Thinking” as a book was a way of processing John’s death. Writing “The Year of Magical Thinking” as a play was a way of processing Quintana’s death. And the act of doing both gave Didion a focus to her days, a way not to fall apart.

“I was still dealing with Quintana’s death,” Didion says. “And I wasn’t dealing with it.”

That struggle ultimately would unfold in the new material she brought to the play. “I don’t even think of it as an adaptation,” the 72-year-old Didion says inside the Booth Theatre, the relatively intimate space where the 90-minute monologue opens on Thursday. “I think of it as something I sat down and wrote -- the same way I sat down and wrote the book. You just start from a different place.”

That different place, as producer Scott Rudin sees it, is the frontlines of heartache. Rudin likens the play to “Dispatches,” reporter Michael Herr’s graphic report from the Vietnam War battlefields. Didion, Rudin says, “is the first journalist to get out of the hot zone.”

From their very first lines, the two works diverge.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant,” Didion’s bestselling book begins, and the author of “The White Album,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “Play It As It Lays” then describes her struggle to comprehend the death of her husband of nearly 40 years and screenwriting partner.

That’s not all she faces: While Didion tries to reassemble her life, she also must wrestle with the failing health of her only daughter. When the book concludes, though, Quintana Roo is still alive.

When the play concludes, though, she, too, has died.

“This happened on Dec. 30, 2003,” Redgrave begins from the nearly bare stage, whose only piece of furniture is a single wood chair and whose only scenery are some massive painted backdrops designed by Bob Crowley. “That may seem a while ago, but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you,” the actress says, gesturing to audience members. “The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”

Didion’s book is exacting, at times even detached. It’s more scientific than spiritual journey. Its author is the ultimately reliable storyteller, revisiting personal experience and sifting through medical, psychological and even etiquette literature to arrive at a new understanding of life without a loved one.

The person on stage, on the other hand, isn’t always as together. “You’ve got a narrator who is telling you something that sometimes you believe, and sometimes you don’t,” Didion says. “She’s not a good reporter on herself.”

She struggles, too, to keep focused. One idea sparks another random idea; the lines connecting her thinking are occasionally difficult to trace. A small incident in the book -- Didion’s avoiding certain Los Angeles streets because of the memories they trigger -- becomes, in the play, a physical and psychological vortex.

“In the book, I’m trying to tell you that I’m trying to figure it out. I’m not evading the subject,” Didion says. “The character on stage -- quite a lot of the time -- is trying to avoid telling you what she’s there to tell you.”

But what is it, exactly, that she’s there to tell you? That was what Didion, Rudin, Redgrave and director David Hare had to figure out.

Rudin says he was only on the book’s second page when he decided it could be adapted into a play. The producer approached Didion, but the author wasn’t interested in the project.

Rudin, who also produced the Tony-winning plays “Doubt,” “Copenhagen” and “The History Boys,” had reason to expect a rejection. “She was kind of this marked figure in the city,” he says. With so much loss in her recent past, “she was radioactive -- people were afraid of her. You couldn’t discuss [the deaths]. And you couldn’t not discuss them.”

Didion’s reluctance had nothing to do with revisiting a closed chapter of her husband’s passing or reopening the fresh wound of her daughter’s death. It’s that she had never written a play, and wasn’t inclined to start now. Furthermore, “The Year of Magical Thinking” was behind her.

“I have never had the impulse to rewrite a book, as many times as I see flaws in them or blank spaces. It just kind of ends for me when it ends,” Didion says.

But the subject matter didn’t end -- it was a recurring part of Didion’s everyday life.

“Over the next couple of weeks, it came to me,” she says. “Everything had changed. This was just a few months after Quintana had died when he brought it up, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do. And it might be just the very time to try something that I had never done before, and it might be entirely absorbing and teach me something.”

What it also taught her is that the same remove that worked so well in writing about John’s death didn’t fit Quintana’s; it was a completely different puzzle, with totally different pieces. One was the death of an elderly spouse, the other the loss of an only child.

That idea of sense battling senselessness surfaced as the fulcrum of the play’s dramatic lever. Hare, who directed Redgrave in the movie “Wetherby,” says from the outset the play could not be a simple reworking of the book. The book is a document of the act of grieving. The play would be that grieving itself.

“The character is behaving in a certain way, which tells the audience what is going on inside of her. A huge amount of the play is subtextual, in a way that a written memoir is not,” says Hare. “Joan has totally reconceived it as a separate work, both in the subject matter and in the treatment.”

Whole parts of the book were excised, some parts were amplified, and a large amount of new material -- largely about Quintana -- was introduced. Redgrave was cast to draw attention to the fact that it wasn’t a recitation of previously published material.

“When you see someone who is physically similar [to a real person], you’re always watching a trick -- you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Isn’t that amazing? Meryl Streep really looks like Nora Ephron,’ ” Didion says. “But that isn’t what we wanted to happen on stage. We wanted the audience to be able to respond -- if they did respond -- directly to the character on stage.”

Like many books adapted for film or stage, the play is often more emotionally moving than the source material. In some performances, Redgrave cries on stage, and a number of audience members gasp when they learn that Quintana dies as well.

“The thing that I think the play says is that the storm is the point,” Rudin says. “As much as we fight to hang on to the things we are losing, you can only really hang on to them by acknowledging that they are lost. And even though the relationships are by their nature temporal, the love you feel for someone is not.”

john.horn@latimes.com