'The Year of Magical Thinking' plays final performance on Broadway .

Joan Didion's one woman show, The Year of Magical Thinking, a stage adaptation of her autobiographical book, plays its final performance on 25 Aug 2007.

The one-woman show, directed by playwright David Hare and starring Vanessa Redgrave, opened at the Booth Theatre on 29 Mar 2007, following previews from 6 Mar 2007, for a strictly limited 24 week engagement. When the show closes it will have played 144 regular performances and 23 previews.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Vanessa Redgrave relives the unforgettable night in Joan Didion's life when, even as her only child lay in a coma, her husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a massive coronary as they sat down to dinner in their New York apartment.

Capturing the compassion, humor, and bewilderment of a fiercely intelligent woman whose world lurches suddenly from the ordinary to the unimaginable, the play is a love letter to a child and a tribute to an extraordinary, unconventional marriage told with raw candor and a storyteller's gift for the absurd.

The play opened to mixed, but mostly good reviews: "Arresting yet ultimately frustrating new drama." (New York Times); " This is acting at its grandest" (New York Post); "If you see only one play this spring, make it 'The Year of Magical Thinking.'" (Journal News); "90 minutes of spellbinding theater." (NewsDay); "An absorbing and memorable experience. But memorable is not the same thing as unforgettable" (New York Sun); "leaves me as stone-cold as the dead" (Bloomaburg"); "A night of magical theater. This is the performance of a lifetime in a lifetime of performances." (New York Theatre Guide).

Critically acclaimed American journalist, essayist and novelist Joan Didion was awarded the National Book Award in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking. A regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Didion is the author of five novels and eight books of nonfiction.

Set desgin for the show was by Bob Crowley, with costumes by Ann Roth and lighting by Jean Kalman.

The Year of Magical Thinking was produced on Broadway by Scott Rudin, Roger Berlind, Daryl Roth, Debra Black and The Shubert Organization.