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An actor has to go to a very dark place to prepare for her role in The Year of Magical Thinking . The one-woman play, based on the searing memoir by the writer Joan Didion, examines a woman's shock and grief following the deaths of her husband and her daughter – within the space of less than two years. It had its Canadian premiere on Thursday Nov. 12 at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, with Seana McKenna in the role.

Seana McKenna in The Year of Magical Thinking, at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria.

“I think anybody contemplating the loss of a husband or child, when you really think about it, when you go through that, it's devastating,” McKenna, 53, said during a recent break from rehearsal. “And you confront what she confronts in the play and in the book, which is I think something that speaks to everybody, because everyone in that audience is going to experience at one time in their life the death of someone they love, because that's the condition of mortality. Someone you love is going to die.”

On Dec. 30, 2003, Didion was making dinner for her husband of almost 40 years, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, after a tough day: They had visited their grown daughter, Quintana, in hospital. She was in the intensive-care unit, on life support. The day got much, much worse. In the middle of a conversation with his wife about the First World War, with a few words thrown in about Scotch, Dunne very suddenly died. Quintana pulled through, but after a series of frantic ups and downs, she died too – at the age of 39, just 20 months after her father.

Didion's memoir – written before Quintana's death and published in 2005 – begins with the words: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” The book received critical acclaim and was also a commercial success.

In 2007, a stage adaptation – incorporating Quintana's death, as well as Dunne's – opened on Broadway starring Vanessa Redgrave. One night that August, Canadian theatre director Michael Shamata was in the audience.

“It was a remarkable evening,” he remembers. “It was very powerful.”

A few months later, when he became artistic director at The Belfry, one of the first things he did was call his old friend McKenna. He made the call before even securing the rights; that's how much he wanted to see McKenna in the role. She read the book and got back to him with a firm yes.

“I think when you do a one-person show, you either have to have written the material yourself or wish you had written it,” says McKenna, who calls the play “an ode to marriage and a meditation on grief.”

The star Canadian stage actor (best known for her work at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont., where she lives) has a few things in common with Didion: a long, happy marriage to a best friend, a husband who works in the same field (McKenna is married to theatre director Miles Potter) and one child – in McKenna's case, Cal, who is 11.

“Of course you have to think about your own personal circumstances in any play you're doing, because you're using yourself and your thoughts to connect with the text that you deliver,” says McKenna. “I do find at times that I become overwhelmed by it, but you carry on, which is in a way lifelike.”

The subject matter may be grim, but Shamata stresses that the story, though tragic, is actually uplifting.

“Ultimately this person is standing on a stage and has survived, and I think we can't forget that.”

The Year of Magical Thinking runs until Dec. 13 at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria ( www.belfry.bc.ca ).