At a reading of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, Vanessa Redgrave recalls her own loss While a performance by Vanessa Redgrave would seem better suited to a theatre, in theory, a platform with two red armchairs in the Cathedral of St John the Divine served as her stage last night. Performed as a benefit for the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids and Cathedral Community Cares, Redgrave performed selections of Joan Didion's 2011 memoir Blue Nights. The two artists and friends had collaborated in the past for the 2007 Broadway staging of Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. That book detailed the loss of Didion's husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, as her daughter, Quintana Roo, became sick with the illness that would ultimately take her life in 2005. Blue Nights is the follow-up text, a remembrance of Quintana, a pondering on the frailty of life and motherhood. Vanessa Redgrave walked to the stage with Jimmy Owens, 2012 NEA Jazz Master, who played the trumpet-flugelhorn during Redgrave's pauses. "For Quintana," Redgrave intoned solemnly, her voice echoing through the vaulted ceilings, and Owens began to play. Redgrave read selections of Blue Nights, starting with Didion remembering Quintana's wedding day, which took place in St John the Divine. The recounting of Quintana's "sentimental choices" and the happiness of that day did not soften the impact of what was to come. Through Redgrave, Didion reminds us why we are here: "When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children." While she read as a stand-in for Didion, Redgrave was reading for herself as well: her own daughter, actor Natasha Richardson, died in 2009. To hear Didion's losses recounted by another was difficult; hearing Redgrave read of her own loss, in Didion's words, was harder. She sat as she read of Tasha, as Didion affectionately calls her, acting as an older friend to Quintana when they were adolescents; of her first wedding in Didion's home; of her second wedding to actor Liam Neeson; of the accident on the ski slope, and of visiting her in the hospital. "This was not supposed to happen to her," Vanessa Redgrave looked up as she read this line, the second time, this time in reference to Natasha. Her words hung in the air as Owens's interlude began again. His music acted as not only a pause in the narrative, but as a chance for the audience to breathe, to collect ourselves. Redgrave proceeded to focus on the end of Blue Nights, and Didion's determination to maintain momentum after the death of Quintana, when she and Redgrave mounted their production of The Year of Magical Thinking. Here, St John the Divine became a setting in the narrative of Blue Nights yet again - this time, as Quintana's final resting place in St Ansgar's Chapel within the cathedral. "Don't dwell on it," Quintana told Didion shortly after the death of John Dunne when she is choosing a poem to read at the memorial service. Didion takes up this phrase, meditating on it, as she closes Blue Nights. "Don't dwell on it," Redgrave repeats. However, Blue Nights itself, and Redgrave's performance, beg, and even demand, to be dwelt upon.