By 6:15, Joan Didion, who made a play of her intimate and intelligent 2005 best-seller on what every widow (and widower) should know, had assumed her battle position at the head banquette, seated across from Marian Seldes for moral support, an empty chair separating them for any well-wishing passerby who might care to stop and chat a while.

"This is my first play so I have no idea what to expect," the 72-year-old Author! Author! would tell people who came by. And, indeed, she looked that way as she later wandered the room, a tiny, fragile figure bewildered by the commotion, looking profoundly alone.

Producer Scott Rudin, who was first to see a play in the book (reportedly as early as Page Four), had an unusual excuse for the late curtain, which was scheduled for 7:45 but went up at 8: "I didn't want to subject this particular play to the six o'clock traffic sounds."

He had a point. Cellphone interruptions — an annoying, unnecessary nuisance for any — produces passing thoughts of a public stoning during this heavy-duty work. Opening night escaped unjangled, but there have been interruptions during the previews.

Also monumentally missing from the Sardi's party was the entire cast of The Year of Magical Thinking — one Vanessa Redgrave. The Tony/Emmy/Oscar winner has been parsimonious in the extreme with her press relations this time around, restricting herself to a tiny interview on "CBS Sunday Morning" and a photo shoot for New York Magazine.

Her practical thinking is this: that nothing — least of all the frivolous promotional periphery of the business, was going to pull her focus away from the Herculean task at hand. At age 70, all by herself, seven times a week, she's making a 100-minute dash to the finish line and delivering, mostly from a sitting position (until the chair disappears — magically, I have no doubt), 15,000 weighty words of bereavement. As a feat of memory, this is a staggering achievement — and then Redgrave goes for an extra miracle of establishing, simply and directly, a laser-like one-on-one connection with the audience.

"This happened on December 30, 2003 — that may seem a while ago, but it won't when it happens to you," it and she begins. Didion's husband, the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, dropped dead in mid-sentence on this date while she was preparing the evening meal. And what follows is a nightmarish year-long roller-coaster on two tracks of thought. The rational part of Didion accepted her husband's death and numbly went through the funeral motions, but there was a deeper, more private part of her which fervently held on to the fantasy that he would soon walk in the door and wonder why she'd given his shoes away. A social worker informs the doctor on the scene that Didion can take the news of her husband's death with the words, "She's a pretty cool customer."

Hardly. Despite her off-the-chart intellect and her controlling nature, Didion was no match for The Great Leveler — and it came at her double-strength: Belatedly, she mentions that this is not her first hospital experience of the day. She and her husband had just returned home from Beth-Israel where their only daughter, Quintana, was in a coma with septic shock. The book ends with the hope she will recover, but she too died around the time of the book's release — and Didion processes that grief in the play as a poignant postscript.

Talk about a Long Day's Journey Into Night! The actress who won a Tony for that may well win a companion piece for The Year of Magical Thinking. When Redgrave finally emerged from the Booth's stage door, holding her roses, she seemed blissfully exhausted and a bit wobbly, wearing the effects of the evening. She managed waves and a tired smile to the mangy remains of the crowd (photographers, TV cameramen, autograph seekers, fans). Then she piled into a waiting car with her family — her son (Carlo Nero), her daughter (Joely Richardson), her granddaughter (Daisy Bevan) and her sister (Lynn Redgrave) — and they were off to a private party with the company at Michael's, the literary hangout on West 55th. Press, having had their own party earlier, wasn't allowed.

Back at Sardi's, the subject was curtains — not the musical, Curtains. There are six in The Year of Magical Thinking — massive, stage-length (30 feet wide x 25 feet high) sheets that plummet to the stage at various points in the monologue, like chapter headings. "It's an old Japanese trick," admitted the show's designer, Bob Crowley. "I did not invent this form of theatre. It's called "The Kabuki Drop." I don't literally know what falling curtains mean, but I know how I felt when I read the piece and wrote a kind of response to it. But, literally, what they mean is up to everybody watching the show. If you literally want to describe them, it's like what people say, 'We have something that was revealed to me.'

"I read the piece through several times together with David Hare, the director, and we just knew there were moments in the piece where things change. Life changes. I wanted to physicalize that in some way. I knew the thing had to do with water and geology and depression and emotion. I tried to express something that's almost inexpressible."

Six painted silk curtains and a chair that comes and goes — that's the sum of work from Crowley, who came in from Amsterdam where a Tarzan he directed and designed is in previews. Compared to his complicated norm (Carousel, Capeman, The Coast of Utopia), his Magical Thinking work is primer-simple. "It's unbelievably simple — and, I think, one of the most favorite things I've done in several years. I tried to talk them into getting me out of designing this. I said, 'You don't need me.' I told Scott Rudin, 'Just do it on a bare stage.' He said, 'No no no!' David was convinced it should be done completely — it should have a visual impact as much as anything else — and, of course, he was right."

Hare, a playwright of some note (and a possible Tony contender in that capacity for the just-departed Vertical Hour), was holding forth about how uniquely qualified he was to direct Vanessa Redgrave. "I directed her in a film called 'Wetherby' that we made in 1985, so I knew her quite well already. Also, there's the idea of having someone direct it who himself had done a one-person show. I did Via Dolorosa here so I knew a lot about one-person shows. That's why I was an ideal person, from Scott's point of view, to do it.

"I had learned from doing a one-person show myself that it's completely different from a regular play. Instead of the audience watching you, it's you talking to the audience so, as you can see, the whole thing is a conversation with the audience. Vanessa obviously had never done anything in which she actually is up on the stage talking to people directly. That's what I tried to work on. But also it's a very, very, very, very demanding text, as you can see, so there are weeks and weeks and weeks of work in the performance."

Maureen Anderman, the Redgrave standby (and a first-class actress in her own right: The Waverly Gallery, Moonchildren, The Lady From Dubuque), took three weeks just to learn the lines. Going on for Redgrave, who almost never misses, is the easiest job in showbiz — "and the most terrifying, as Walter Bobbie says," Anderman hastened to add. Continued...