The White Album by Joan Didion (2018)

The White Album is a staging of Joan Didion’s seminal essay that traverses the tectonically shifting landscape of the late 1960s in California. A California native with an unmistakably cool and always illuminating style, Didion epitomized the voice of Los Angeles. Published in 1979, The White Album is a compilation of flashes into the author’s memories of iconic figures and events of the late 1960s from the Manson murders to the Black Panthers to student protests. By expressing the impossibility of any narrative to make sense of her time, Didion creates one of the defining and enduring stories of all time.

In Jan’s adaptation, Obie Award-winning actress Mia Barron performs the text’s fifteen vignettes in full while a parallel performance unfolds behind and around her. Two separate audiences—a traditional one seated in the theater and a smaller onstage audience of emerging storytellers—(including young artists, activists, and students)—experience the work simultaneously from different vantage points. The inner audience morphs from spectatorship to participation over the course of the work, connecting their experience of the contemporary moment with the radical forces at play in Didion’s work. The performance underscores stark similarities between the late 1960s and the present, challenging us to look critically at the past and incubating real-time conversation around new paths forward. The performance culminates with an open forum conversation involving both audiences and the creative team.