‘Magical Thinking’ is a harrowing tour de force

Earlier this decade, while confronting the protracted illness of her daughter Quintana, who neglected flu-like symptoms to develop a toxic syndrome that required her to be hospitalized and put in a coma to heal, author Joan Didion experienced a second family tragedy; her husband and Quintana’s father, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, succumbed to heart problems and keeled over at the dinner table, atomizing her nuclear family. In a matter of months, after the dutiful daughter spoke at her father’s funeral, Quintana, too, was gone, succumbing to a relapse.

Didion wrote a well-received book about this period in her life — the bargaining one makes to deny the finality of death, the mystical, shell-shocked heightened awareness that sometimes takes place when confronting grief — in her book ‘‘The Year of Magical Thinking.”

Didion helped adapt the book for the stage in 2007 where it became a starring vehicle for Vanessa Redgrave. Now the District’s Studio Theatre has brought the one woman show to Washington with actress Helen Hedman in the lead.

It’s a spare show. The long essay that makes up the book, with its contextual asides, recollection of pivotal family moments and hard-edged reporting from the abyss, has largely been left intact. The set is bare bones, with a high-back wicker chair, table and ottoman framed inside a rectangular wooden archway. An abstract black-and-white splatter painting is the sole decorative element.

Although unnecessary given the universal nature of the material, Hedman, in black cigarette pants, a fuzzy cowl-necked sweater, an elongated bob haircut and oversize sunglasses.

Hedman, channeling the journalist and social critic, starts off by dispassionately laying out the events that led to the character’s current state of mind. Only after speaking about her husband’s passing and the frenzied arrival and departure of emergency medical personnel does she let drop that the event unfolded after the couple had visited their severely ill daughter in the hospital.

‘‘I don’t think I’m up to this,” Dunne tells his wife after they visit Quintana, and Didion jokes about how one doesn’t have a choice in confronting the messiness of life. Later, however, she thinks of how this might have been a kind of confession; a resignation that her husband truly could not rouse himself for the battle ahead.

Noting a calm demeanor after riding to the hospital with her post-heart attack, a social worker assigned to Didion’s case describes the author as a ‘‘cool customer,” something she initially bridles at. But as the narrator’s unresolved issues and list of what-could-have-beens mount, her facade melts, and we see her emotions exposed as the monologue becomes an only slightly repressed primal scream. Hedman manages to bring the audience along on each upward and downward slope of Didion’s emotional rollercoaster.

Didion recalls some of the less than idyllic exchanges she had with her husband in their marriage with a tinge of recrimination in the play. ‘‘Must you always have the last word?” and ‘‘Can’t you let it go?” he would always tell her when they argued. Hedman evokes these haunting words periodically as a kind of refrain throughout the play, a potent reminder that the final word has indeed been spoken.

Under the direction of Serge Selden and Joy Zinoman, Eric Shimelonis has written some brief incidental music for the production: minimalistic piano notes, and briefly, a string quartet. This provides a segue between the stories of loss, allowing the narrator to recollect herself, migrate from chair to ottoman or pace the stage, making individual anecdotes more digestible and letting the little epiphanies stand out that much more.

Studio’s production of ‘‘The Year of Magical Thinking” is harrowing but stately; a reminder of what we will all go through at some point in our lives, as the author duly warns us at the outset. You can avoid the production a lot easier than you can avoid the dominion of death, but wouldn’t it be more advantageous to have a tour guide trace the sign posts on that journey before you embark on the trip yourself?