Oppressed and profoundly discouraged from my past several months witnessing half-baked shallow acting found on San Diego stages, I sought out part of an interview I recalled with an actress of Olympian emotional vérité and bullet proof technique. She is an actress who possesses deep love and respect for the Theatre.
The following is an excerpt with Vanessa Redgrave from Jill Lawless's Associated Press interview conducted during 
Redgrave's appearance is Joan Didion's solo play "A Year of Magical Thinking." The play is Didion's response to witnessing her husband’s sudden death during her only daughter’s final stages of a fatal illness.
Redgrave sees herself as "a conduit" for Didion's words and maintains a commitment to the Theatre's primal origins.
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"My goal is to, as a solo voice and as the shadow of the writer, be a sort of freeway for whoever comes to listen and watch, to get all that she's written," she (Redgrave) says.
"I am perhaps more like that tradition that was the only way of conveying a story or a poem for thousands of years -- I'm the speaker. There are different words for that in different countries, different cultures, but that's how stories and poems were conveyed -- whether it's Euripides' Hecuba or Joan Didion's magical thinking."
Redgrave likens Didion's writing to "photographs of the mind. Very complex and very simple at the same time."
Or, she says, like sitting in the doctor's office, "and he brings up on the screen what the computer imagists have found and have taken out in order to highlight the interior of a limb. And it'll turn around and you can see it: north, south, east, west, inside, outside.
"It's a kind of a miracle when you see it, at least that's how it strikes me. And I feel exactly the same about Joan's book."
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