Movie Review Joan Didion the Center Will Not Hold
California has survived on a number of familiar stories. There is the story of James Marshall and the Gold Blitz. In that location is the story of the doomed Donner Party from which Californians have extracted the lesson that it is distinctly possible for all people to betray their own blood. From parents, there are the cautionary tales of earthquakes and the Santa Anas, the warnings that when they come — and they will — the tree will plummet on the sedan, the listen will be shocked to flash point.
"Nosotros tell ourselves stories in order to live."
This is the first sentence of Joan Didion'southward seminal essay "The White Album," which borrows its title from The Beatles' experimental tape. It remains 1 of the most iconic openings of any American essay. Simply as striking, however, is what Didion adds in the following paragraph as a caveat: "Or at least we do for a while."
What Didion is hinting at are the troubled terms of our existence. She writes, "We alive entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
But what if we cannot draw cogent connections in our lives, and what if the "disparate images" we see do not lend themselves to any "narrative lines" nosotros know? At what point do our stories — the ones we make to comfort ourselves — desert usa?
"The White Anthology" — spanning nearly 40 pages and written over a ten-year period from 1968 to 1978 — undertakes the task of trying to make sense of 1960s America, a time in history devoid of any intelligible zeitgeist. Information technology was a period when Didion herself reported, generally from California, not a cohesive narrative simply "flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'pregnant' beyond their temporary organisation, not a movie but a cutting room experience."
At present, over forty years since its publication, Didion's essay has been reincarnated. Lars Jan, visual creative person and manager of Early Morning Opera, has adapted "The White Album" into a scenic theatrical piece. The W Coast portion of the tour opened at UCLA's Ralph Freud Playhouse and ran from April 5 to 7.
Similar Didion'due south essay, Jan's production resists the enterprise of traditional storytelling. January presents the fractured stills captured in "The White Anthology" — Didion'due south interviews with Linda Kasabian, her reportage of the Black Panther Political party, her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and many beside — as a kaleidoscope of haunting images that appear "more than electrical than ethical." Jan stages fragmented vignettes that arrange themselves not into a puzzle, but into a handful of glass shards with no respective edges.
In an era when "false news" has become a fixture of our lives, where senselessness often offers itself every bit the only explanation for things, "The White Album" proves to exist a timeless and timely slice. Information technology is the very incomprehensibility of life on which both Didion's essay and Jan's performance are predicated.
To capture the "cutting room feel" Didion describes in her essay, Jan's "White Album" relies on some unusual artistic choices. Showtime, there are two audiences in the theater during the performance: an "outer" audition that spectates from traditional seating, and an "inner," college-aged audience that sits onstage witnessing the commotion unfold and partaking in it themselves.
Dominating the phase is a large rectangular house; its all-white interior, oft colored past flashes of neon light, tin be seen through tall glass panels. Within this structure, the piece establishes many different settings. The audience, always engaged, is transported from the office of Didion'southward psychiatrist to The Doors' recording studio on Dusk Boulevard, from a party with Janis Joplin to a Students for a Democratic Society meeting at San Francisco State Academy.
Leading performer, Mia Barron, who is too Jan'south co-creator, achieves the impressive feat of reciting about the entirety of "The White Album" every bit one of the evidence'due south sole narrators.
Clad in a white long-sleeve shirt and tan halter skirt — with a middle-role dividing her brown hair — Barron convincingly plays the office of Didion herself. She delivers Didion'southward famous anecdotes with a absurd, sinistral energy, and she eerily conjures a adult female who, despite being named a Los Angeles Times Adult female of the Year in 1968, was also characterized by a psychiatrist as having a "fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic and depressive view of the world around her."
Barron succeeds in depicting both a adult female and an era experiencing bizarre and occasionally violent events. The murder trial of the Ferguson brothers, the nurse who watched as Blackness Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton bled to death, the stranger who showed up at Didion's abode on Franklin Artery, empty-handed simply all the same offering "Chicken Please" — these comprised a montage of scenes which, to Didion, meant nothing and everything.
"I believe this to be an authentically senseless concatenation of correspondences," Didion admits, "merely in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer information technology fabricated as much sense as anything else did."
Following the staged performance, both inner and outer audiences are merged into one. There is no longer stardom between bandage and audience, director and usher, as all are open up to partake in a give-and-take.
"I lived through all of this," i woman stood up and affirmed at the production I attended, "and naught actually fabricated sense and so. It doesn't really make sense now."
Many often misread Didion's essay as one of sheer cynicism. Jan'south product reminds us that "The White Album" is non a project of senselessness, but a project near senselessness. Yeah, Didion elucidates the horror of disorder, of being unable to find "the sermon in the suicide, the social or moral lesson in the murder of five," but she provides hope that a life can all the same be manageable and fulfilling amid such anarchy.
In his manager'southward note, Jan contends that by "laying bare the near breakdown of her coping machinery," Didion has distilled the nonsense of her life into "one of the virtually illuminating stories of all." He has reproduced this frightening affect with his stunning phase accommodation.
Midway through the performance, Barron emerges from the night; she is of a sudden atop the drinking glass house. Fog clouds her facial features, and she stands stiffly, arms by her side, as a hazy light emanates from behind her. Staring blankly forward, she seems confused, frightened even, and she is paralyzed by the accounts she has just detailed. She has lived through these accounts onstage.
"There were rumors. At that place were stories. Everything was unmentionable," she rattles off, holding a pause so continuing. "But nothing was unimaginable."
"Everything was unmentionable," Barron says. "But nothing was unimaginable."
Therein lies the deviation, and therein lies the promise.
Source: https://dailytrojan.com/2019/04/10/review-theater-production-reanimates-classic-didion-essay/
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