I saw a lot of old friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in quite some time last weekend. And as sometimes happens for people of a certain age, shades of sorrow and remembrance for those no longer here crept into the conversation. No matter how much we try to play whack-a-mole with the Reaper, he’s there waiting patiently for us. All we can do in the meantime is laugh or cry. Or both.
Two solo shows currently running in town take very different approaches to the subject of mortality. Mike Birbiglia’s The Old Man and the Pool at Steppenwolf traces the comedian’s stumbling steps toward trying to get healthy-ish—as much for the sake of his young daughter as for himself. And in Remy Bumppo’s revival of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (the 2007 play based on Didion’s 2005 memoir), Didion, as embodied by the luminous Annabel Armour, takes us through the simultaneous death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the illnesses (and eventual death) of their daughter, Quintana Roo. (Quintana died before the book was published, but Didion didn’t revise to reflect that; instead, she incorporated that tragedy for the play and dedicated a second book, 2011’s Blue Nights, to her late daughter. In a sad twist, Vanessa Redgrave starred in the premiere of the play—two years before the death of her own daughter, Natasha Richardson.)
The Old Man and the Pool and The Year of Magical Thinking
The Old Man and the Pool, through 5/22, Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat-Sun 4 and 8 PM; no show Thu 5/5 or Sun 5/8; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $55-$75.
The Year of Magical Thinking, through 6/5, Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Sat 5/14, 5/21, and 6/4, 2:30 PM and Thu 5/26, 2:30 PM; audio description and touch tour Sat 5/14 (touch tour begins 1 PM); open caption performance Thu 5/26, 2:30 PM; Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, remybumppo.org, $35-$55 (industry $20/students $15).
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion (who died this past December) wrote in 1979’s The White Album—just one of the volumes of essays she created that perhaps captured the confusions and hypocrisies of midcentury post-WWII American life more vividly than anyone else. Meanwhile, Birbiglia’s stories fit the age-old function of comedy as coping mechanism. He’s mined the territory of his health in the past, most notably in his 2008 show Sleepwalk with Me (which later became a 2010 book and a 2012 film). Birbiglia has rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, which causes him to do things like cook dinner in his sleep. Oh, and at one point, to jump out of a second-floor motel window (“like the Hulk”) and end up with dozens of stitches. He now goes to bed in a sleeping bag, wearing mittens, as a preventative measure, and that feels like a pretty damn good metaphor for . . . (gestures weakly) everything in our current timeline.
Preventative measures and postmortem regrets and nostalgia form the threads connecting these two shows. Birbiglia’s show takes its title from a memory he has of the YMCA where he tried to learn to swim as a kid; the titular aged dude used to sit naked on the bench in the locker room, supremely unconcerned with his level of exposure. Armour’s Didion returns to a happy memory of Quintana as a child in Malibu, being dried off by her father after a dip in their pool. The warmth of that memory contrasts with the ice floes in the East and Hudson rivers that she sees outside the hospital rooms where Quintana struggles to recover after her first life-threatening illness.
Birbiglia (who also beat bladder cancer as a college student) isn’t going gentle into either the good night or the pool; a recurring bit in the show is his arguing for precisely 45 minutes each time with the various doctors he’s sent to for his various conditions about the obvious need for him to eat better and exercise more. (I feel you, Mike!) An early story illustrating his reluctant approach to high school wrestling is hilarious (his strategy of trying to get pinned as quickly as possible doesn’t work once he has an opponent equally eager to lose), but also physicalizes the deflection techniques that seem to have guided Birbiglia’s life choices. (Again, I feel you, Mike!)
But realizing that both his father and his grandfather had heart attacks at 56 (they survived them), and that his own kid, Oona, will be 19 when he’s 56, lights the fire under his posterior to try to do something about his cholesterol and early-stage Type II diabetes. Birbiglia is far too honest and realistic to sell life-changing transformation narratives; if we change at all, it’s in little ways, accruing over time. But if life isn’t about being around for the small stuff (like reading books and making puns at bedtime with your kid), what is it about, really?
Birbiglia’s delivery remains deliciously dry and deadpan, with offhand observations on even the smallest details. Like how some doorbells just scream “We’re rich!,” or how all toddlers sound like they’re from Boston when announcing they’re ready for a nap: “I’m TAWRehd!” (Being from Massachusetts, Birbiglia adds that Boston toddlers say, “I’m WICKED TAWRehd!”)
Armour’s Didion carries her book as if it’s a talisman. I don’t think this is an actor’s crutch, as the pages appear to be blank, but is instead a directorial choice by Gabrielle Randle-Bent that emphasizes the comfort a writer—this one in particular—finds in shaping the world on the page. As in her essays, Didion makes ironic connections between the personal and the political; she recalls, for example, that the dress she wore at her wedding to Dunne was purchased the same day as the JFK assassination, and also remembers that a family trip to Honolulu coincided with the My Lai massacre.
Armour has the difficult task of playing the person to whom these things are happening and the observer trying to make sense of it later on. (In the hospital the night that Dunne dies, she is met by a social worker and instantly notes, “If they give you a social worker, you’re in trouble.”)
That split consciousness doesn’t always gel in terms of guiding the narrative arc, and the show sometimes feels a little pulled-in and closed-off emotionally as a result. But that may also be a function of the writer’s double job to excise the obviously sentimental, while exorcising the pain of seemingly unendurable loss as honestly as possible. Armour’s Didion is set on finding the “reversible error” that can turn back time and restore her loved ones to her, even as she knows that’s not happening. But that’s why they call it “magical thinking,” after all.
Yeaji Kim’s set is a simple winding wooden walkway, dusted with sand, curving down toward the audience, with a plain bench set upstage. It recalls the happy beach life of Didion’s family during Quintana’s childhood, as well as the eternal pull of the sea as a crucible of life. Heather Sparling’s sparse autumnal lighting also suggests the twilight of our days, and Jeffrey Levin’s sound and original music weave together birdsong, waves, and dripping water.
In Didion’s account, one of the most heart-tugging moments is when Dunne, hours away from his own sudden death by a heart attack, whispers to the comatose Quintana, “I love you more than one more day”—a line from the 1976 film Robin and Marian, in which Sean Connery’s legendary outlaw and the love of his youth, played by Audrey Hepburn, try to rekindle past romance and glory. Birbiglia, by contrast, notes that his family’s preferred sign-off isn’t “I love you,” but rather “take care.” But in their own contrasting ways, The Year of Magical Thinking and The Old Man and the Pool ask us to consider how we care for ourselves and each other, always hoping to reverse the error, or to at least stop time long enough to remember why we treasure each other as the big clock runs down.
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