The Year of Magical Thinking
Special Theatrical Performance

*This performance is SOLD OUT!

Doors Open 6:30PM

Event starts at 7PM

Join Off-Broadway’s Keen Theater Company for the first New York revival of The Year of Magical Thinking by beloved author Joan Didion. This site-specific production is conceived and directed by Jonathan Silverstein, and starring Obie and Drama Desk Award-winner Kathleen Chalfant in a moving one-woman performance. 

Adapted from the best-selling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking recounts Didion’s journey of loss, perseverance, and ultimately hope, using her signature wit to draw an intimate portrait of the resilience of the human heart.

This unique theatrical event will be brought directly to its audience, staged in non-traditional theater venues including living rooms, libraries, and other community spaces throughout New York City. The Year of Magical Thinking runs 90 minutes with no intermission. Find more information on Keen Company’s website here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in California and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Joan Didion (1934-2021) spent her adult life in New York and Los Angeles. Winner of the 2005 National Book Award, The Year of Magical Thinking is one of 13 books by Joan Didion. Her other books include Play It As It Lays, Democracy, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami and Political Fictions. With her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she wrote the screenplays for such pictures as The Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino, True Confessions with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand and Up Close & Personal with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded her its 2005 Gold Medal in nonfiction. She also received the 1996 Edward MacDowell Medal, the 1999 Columbia Journalism Award and the 2002 George Polk Book Award. She contributed to various periodicals, most frequently The New York Review of Books.

ABOUT THE STAR
Kathleen Chalfant as Joan Didion:  In a career spanning more than five decades, Kathleen Chalfant’s performances on stage, screen and television have garnered her praise and acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Perhaps best known for her shattering portrayal of Vivian Bearing, a scholar battling cancer, in Wit, she received the Obie, the Drama Desk, the Lucille Lortel, the Outer Critics Circle, the Ovation, Connecticut Critics Circle, the Garland and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for her work. BROADWAY: Angels in America (Tony and Drama Desk nom.), Racing Demon, Dance With Me. OFF-BROADWAY: A Woman of the World, Wit (Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, Connecticut Critics Circle, Obie Awards), For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, A Walk in the Woods (Drama Desk nom.), Tales from Red Vienna, Miss Ovington & Dr. Dubois, Talking Heads (Obie Award), Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Nine Armenians (Drama Desk nomination), Henry V (Callaway Award), and more.

ABOUT KEEN COMPANY
Keen Theater Company is a Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway company creating theater that connects. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, we celebrate the complexities of hope and the joys of the human condition. Keen also fosters mid-career playwrights through our Keen Playwrights Lab and mentors students from all five boroughs of NYC through our Keen Teens education program. In everything we do, Keen Company thrives through our welcoming ethos and community commitments. www.keencompany.org

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