{"id":131235,"date":"2018-11-29T11:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T16:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131235"},"modified":"2018-11-29T16:09:59","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T21:09:59","slug":"we-tell-ourselves-stories-didions-the-white-album-takes-to-the-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/29\/we-tell-ourselves-stories-didions-the-white-album-takes-to-the-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"We Tell Ourselves Stories: Didion\u2019s \u201cWhite Album\u201d Takes to the Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Lars Jan<\/p><\/div>\n

I was told to wait outside a dinged-up stage door on Ashland Place, in Brooklyn. When I rang the bell, the door opened, and I was ushered through a series of winding passages and deposited by the front row of the theater. A monologue emerged from what sounded like a tape recorder. The voice was warbling about an unnamed patient experiencing a mental break:<\/p>\n

It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.<\/em><\/p>\n

The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lines would be instantly recognizable to any fan of Joan Didion\u2019s now iconic essay \u201cThe White Album.\u201d It\u2019s the first moment when the reader begins to understand just how unwell and perhaps unreliable the narrator really is, when the kaleidoscope turns and the essay rearranges itself into something darker than expected. \u201cThe White Album,\u201d first published in 1979, is perhaps the single work most closely associated with Didion, and 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of many of the events she describes: the Manson murders, the rise of the Black Panthers and Huey Newton\u2019s arrest, the student takeover of San Francisco State College, and the writer\u2019s own breakdown.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the decades since \u201cThe White Album\u201d was published, Didion has written many groundbreaking films, essays, and memoirs (including The Year of Magical Thinking<\/em>, which was adapted into a play in 2007). A nominee for a Pulitzer and a National Book Critic Circles award, and the winner of a National Book Award, she also has the honor of being\u00a0the\u00a0inaugural author in\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0Art of Nonfiction interview series. <\/em>My own copies of her books have been underlined, highlighted, and dog-eared\u2014now, I was hearing her words echo through the cavernous hall of the BAM Harvey Theater.<\/p>\n

I had arrived on the set of Lars Jan\u2019s production of The White Album <\/em>during a period of frantic minor adjustments. Early Morning Opera\u2019s adaptation of Didion\u2019s essay would premiere at the BAM Next Wave Festival on November 28\u2014in twenty-four hours\u2014and the company had started rehearsals in the Brooklyn space\u00a0only that morning. A white telephone for a surreptitious drug call had gone missing, the lighting during one sequence wasn\u2019t quite psychedelic\/psychotic enough, and the keyboard was failing to groan in the correct manner. Actors stretched in a corner while techs circled in the wings; the atmosphere cycled from excitement to tension to boredom and back again.<\/p>\n

Jan stopped the action and called from the back of the house to Mia Barron, the voice of Joan Didion\u2019s narrator (and also Jan\u2019s partner). The moment needed tweaking, a beat added or subtracted. Like a ghost, Barron\u2019s Didion wandered through the empty space of an antiseptic box made of metal and sound-dampening glass that occupied the center of the stage. It looked like a trailer designed by Philip Johnson, sparsely furnished with a mid-century wooden desk, a typewriter, records, and a few books.<\/p>\n

Jan explained that the box would be filled with a party of semi-coached audience members, who would experience their own \u201chappening\u201d during the performance. This play within a play was meant to recall the house on Franklin Avenue where much of the essay\u2019s action occurs: drug-fueled parties and Easter lunches, a trippy conversation about death auras with a babysitter, and a strange encounter with a thief who pretends to be a deliveryman. \u201cChicken delight?\u201d he offers feebly, before running out the door. Throughout the show, there would be Super 8 footage from the protests Didion describes, musical performances, and a dance party\u2014all happening against the backdrop of Barron\u2019s narration. The cast refer to the people inside this fishbowl as the \u201cinner audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jan, who wore a red-and-white beanie and mismatched canvas loafers, greeted me onstage and introduced me to Barron. Since founding Early Morning Opera in 2004, Jan has written and directed \u201cgenre-bending performance\u201d pieces that stretch the limits of theater and visual spectacle, performing at venues such as the Whitney Museum and the Sundance Film Festival. Much of his work deals with social or political themes, but this piece was Jan\u2019s first adaptation (and the first time he and Barron had collaborated on a project, \u201cto save money on hotel rooms\u201d). They were eager to get it right.<\/p>\n

Adapting a work of such intentional ambiguity, however, presents challenges. The essay is fragmented and explicitly resists the easy formulas and structures of conventional narrative. It races through emotional registers and attempts to encapsulate an entire era in Didion\u2019s life, flitting restlessly from scene to scene. \u201cThe White Album\u201d doesn\u2019t lend itself to dramatization.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think one of the most inspiring aspects of working with the material is it\u2019s an incredible piece of collage,\u201d said Jan. Rather than literally reenacting scenes, a small chorus rotates through the other speaking parts, with Barron\u2019s Didion \u201csurfing in a visual and energetic landscape.\u201d Jan wanted to heighten this sense of chaos and juxtaposition through a layering of media.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a Madame Tussaud\u2019s wax museum where there\u2019s somebody playing Huey Newton, or any of the characters in the essay,\u201d Jan added.<\/p>\n

Barron came to the material from a much more traditional theater background, having for many years written and performed on and off Broadway. \u201cI\u2019m much more a performer rooted in psychology and language, and that\u2019s my pull to enter a world,\u201d Barron explained. Though Didion has come to saturate contemporary culture\u2014her image appears on everything from merchandise at the Strand to C\u00e9line ad campaigns\u2014Barron\u2019s goal is to get past the aura and find the occasionally aloof writer\u2019s emotional core. \u201cI have a deep interest, appetite, and compulsion to live inside her thoughts, and bring this language to life,\u201d Barron said.<\/p>\n

The primary challenge of adapting \u201cThe White Album,\u201d however, has been not the text itself but getting permission to use it. For years, Jan and Barron had unsuccessfully tried to reach Didion: emails, through agents and friends, even sending typewritten letters on LP sleeves from the Beatles\u2019 White Album<\/em>. Through a mutual friend, the couple met Griffin Dunne, Didion\u2019s nephew, who in 2017 released a documentary about her life, The Center Will Not Hold<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause our staging is in no way traditional \u2026 I think one of the selling points in our pitch to her was: We\u2019re going to perform every word,\u201d said Jan.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sounded really interesting, so I told Joan,\u201d Dunne explained, calling from a room at the Chateau Marmont. Dunne feels the play brings out the way history rhymes with the present. Though many of the protests, murders, parties, and trials in the essay took place fifty years ago, the issues that sparked them have smoldered on: structural inequality, drug addiction, racism, police brutality, random acts of violence\u2014a general feeling that we are watching the end of the world. \u201cMaybe people are finding comfort in reading about a time that was just as fucked up as these times are,\u201d said Dunne.<\/p>\n

As the cast broke for dinner, I followed Jan outside. We walked through Fort Greene (where he used to live before he and Barron moved to Los Angeles), discussing the day\u2019s rehearsal and the work that still had to be done that evening. Jan tried to shield his cigarette against the November wind while answering my questions about the timing of the show, and how the issues Didion raised in her essay still animate contemporary life in America.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the questions that I want the piece to ask is: What is our trajectory? And how do we see ourselves headed toward 2068?\u201d he said. \u201cI think anniversaries are interesting because they give us the moment to reflect on the past, on what\u2019s changed and what hasn\u2019t changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Would he have handled the material in the same way if he were staging The White Album<\/em> on the essay\u2019s fortieth anniversary, to coincide with Obama\u2019s election?<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019d done it ten years ago, I probably would have been missing a big story,\u201d he replied. \u201cThe divides and resistance to systemic change were actually still foundationally there in the country, and because of the promise of the moment, I would have just missed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A young man carrying a duffel bag interrupted Jan to ask whether he\u2019d be willing to trade a smoke for a tallboy of beer. \u201cYou can drink it later,\u201d the man suggested.<\/p>\n

Jan declined, but extended a cigarette from his pack.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks, man,\u201d the man with the duffel bag replied, flashing a peace sign. It felt like a moment out of another time, something Didion herself might have witnessed in Berkeley or San Francisco or Los Angeles decades ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI first read The White Album<\/em> when I was sixteen,\u201d Jan said. \u201cI was excited about her connection with the counterculture. She was in the Doors\u2019 recording session! She was meeting the Black Panthers!\u2009\u2026 I was into that nihilistic, almost cruel remove that characterizes Didion\u2019s writing \u2026 She tends to cast a withering gaze in all directions.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in the intervening decades, Jan\u2019s impressions of the text have changed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I\u2019ve grown older, though, really the very famous first sentence, \u2018We tell ourselves stories in order to live,\u2019 has taken on more complex shades,\u201d he said. \u201cI went through feeling like: I am an artist, and I can create meaning, and that\u2019s a source of power, to a version that\u2019s more akin to, We create delusions to get by. And I find myself constantly pivoting between those two.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daniel Penny<\/a>\u00a0writes\u00a0about art and culture at\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,<\/em> Boston Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and visual culture at Parsons School of Design.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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