‘Thinking' Out Loud

"A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee."

This line from the 1806 elegy "Rose Aylmer," with its promise of finite suffering, was an insufficient but understandable comfort to Joan Didion in 2004. That harrowing year — after the sudden death of her husband and collaborator, the writer John Gregory Dunne, along with the ongoing tenuous health of their adult daughter, Quintana — served as the basis for her superb book "The Year of Magical Thinking."

One of Ms. Didion's more sobering realizations was the ludicrous inadequacy of even a year, let alone one mere night, to dim what she calls her "obliterative, dislocating" shock. And yet her crisp, magnificently observed efforts conveyed her memories with sufficient grace to offer an intellectualized but no less gripping form of consecration. The same can be said, to a lesser degree, about David Hare and Vanessa Redgrave, her collaborators on a compelling if flawed new stage adaptation of the book.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the stage incarnation has a sterility that the book lacked, despite the presence of a living, breathing presence to lead us through these memories. Ms. Didion (portrayed by Ms. Redgrave) informs the audience that we are all going to lose our loved ones most likely sooner than we think. "You don't want to think it could happen to you," she says. "That's why I'm here."

This shift in tone is understandable but not necessarily wise: Ms. Didion's own elliptical, obfuscatory thought processes are as crucial an element to the book's power as the universally experienced events that trigger such thoughts. The story works as well as it does because it, in many crucial ways, could never happen to anyone but Joan Didion. Claiming otherwise, while accurate in a broader sense, widens the focus in a way that makes her less, not more, accessible.

Ms. Didion and Mr. Hare, her respectful and relatively unintrusive director, use chunks of the book almost verbatim, adding a few pertinent anecdotes (including one she concedes may have been an imagined manifestation of her grief) to illustrate the form of "‘if' thinking" described in the title. Crucially, and for reasons that most audience members will understand, the two have also shifted the focus to include Quintana nearly as much as John.

Mr. Hare's obvious directorial contributions are few and far between: a few unnecessary dollops of sound effects and a series of wistful, watercolor-style backdrops from set designer Bob Crowley that subdivide the play into what amounts to chapters. He has also helped whittle Ms. Redgrave's performance to a piercing minimum, drawing upon her regal composure and her ability to rivet audiences with the sparest of movements.

Her shoulder-length white hair gradually spilling out from its holder, Ms. Redgrave — employing a strange but somehow appropriate amalgam of East and West Coast speech inflections — captures both the depths and the limitations of comprehension in the face of loss. Her measured, pointillist performance comes as close as any could to embodying her subject's agonizing changes in tone. This is particularly effective when she describes the "vortex effect," in which Ms. Didion free-associates from the most innocuous images into treacherous memories of her husband and daughter. These caroming sequences play perfectly to Ms. Redgrave's mercurial strengths, and her portrayal of a woman struggling in vain to achieve mastery of an unthinkable situation is riveting.

In an effort to avoid such destabilizing events, Ms. Didion routinely tries — and fails — to find answers through immersion in literature. The book of "Magical Thinking" lists some three dozen such texts, from Freud to medical journals to Thomas Mann to the Episcopal liturgy to Emily Post (a surprisingly helpful source) to Dunne's own novels. Ms. Didion and Mr. Hare don't abandon this convention entirely, but aside from "Rose Aylmer" and a small handful of non-fiction authors, the references have been scaled back considerably.

Ms. Didion instead focuses more on her memories of Quintana, a change that speaks to the crucial difference between the two versions. Both address John's death of a massive coronary at the outset, saving any reminiscences of the couple's enmeshed lives for subsequent flashbacks. But as anyone who has followed this story knows, there is an epilogue that cannot be ignored. Quintana, who had gotten married just five months earlier, was in a coma with septic shock the night her father died, and the ensuing year included several stretches of her health waxing and waning.

That much is discussed at length in both versions. What is not discussed is that Quintana died of pancreatitis in 2005, just a few weeks before publication of the book. She was 39 years old. This awful fact hovers over every line of the play for anyone familiar with Ms. Didion's story, but she avoids any discussion of it until the final 15 minutes.

Wrapping up the narrative in a way that does sufficient honor to both losses — one of which has only been introduced a few moments earlier — as well as to Ms. Didion's experiences gets the better of her. The final 10 minutes stop and start with an abruptness very unlike the earlier hairpin emotional turns. These abortive stabs at summation all but scuttle the book's hypnotic symmetries, reducing her devastatingly lucid experience to the almost desperate gasps of a storyteller who has more to say than she has time to say it.

Doing complete justice to the book in any other medium, especially given the intervening events, would require almost superhuman abilities. It would require the intellectual discipline of a Joan Didion, the theatrical savvy of a David Hare, and the near-limitless emotional and cerebral resources of a Vanessa Redgrave.

And yet, even with these potent ingredients in place, the stage incarnation frequently brushes up against but rarely surpasses the book's austere majesty. Coming even this close makes "The Year of Magical Thinking" an absorbing and memorable experience. But memorable is not the same thing as unforgettable.

Until August 25 (222 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).