As is so often the case in Hollywood, this Broadway season has been dominated by male driven vehicles. Yet, the hottest ticket in town is for "The Year of Magical Thinking," a one woman tour-de-force by Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner Vanessa Redgrave , who brings to life Joan Didion's memoir about the death of her husband, screenwriter John Gregory Dunne. While the play met with mixed reviews, the critics were unanimous in their praise of Redgrave who is now the frontrunner for best actress at the Tonys in June.

Ben Brantley, influential critic of The New York Times, thought, "Ms. Redgrave, in a simple pale skirt and blouse, is an imposing, Cassandra-like creature, a prophetess at a temple of doom where we must all someday arrive." He suggests, "students of acting buy tickets as close as possible to the stage to observe the presence and craft that allows one woman to hold an audience’s attention for 90 uninterrupted minutes." An unabashed fan of Didion - "her voice is one of the most insistently hypnotic in literature" - Brantley was disappointed, "that though the script is by Ms. Didion, with many of its sentences lifted directly from the memoir, I never heard Ms. Didion’s voice when Ms. Redgrave was speaking."

In Newsday, Linda Winer was more enthusiastic about this pairing of actress and author, calling it, "an electrifying confluence of formidable females, in which this magnificent actress has reached her long, lean tentacles into Didion's deep, lean recollections, fastens those pewter eyes on a space beyond the audience and dares us to think that we have ever before heard any of this exquisitely told story." And Elyse Gardner of USA Today thought, "the scrupulous integrity of Didion's writing, her refusal to indulge in cheap theatrics, demands that Redgrave use the full weight of her presence while also showing great reserve." She found that, "the actress meets that challenge, mining the wit and grace of Didion's words and the mind-bending sorrow of her experience, miraculously, while remaining seated through most of the show, imparting expressive powers to such simple gestures as clutching her hands or playing with her hair."

To Michael Kuchwara of AP, "Didion is an impeccable observer, and when her insights and descriptions are delivered by an actress as accomplished as Vanessa Redgrave, you know the evening will achieve moments of eloquence." However, "despite the star's formidable presence, 'Magical Thinking' still works better on the page than on the stage. Didion's language is cerebral and exact; her musings punctuated by careful and detailed research. It doesn't easily lend itself to theater." David Rooney of Variety thought the opposite, "as in adapting the book for the stage, Didion has filleted the text into a spare but compelling solo piece. Whether or not it's a play is difficult to judge in David Hare's audaciously austere production, given how inextricably linked the work is to Vanessa Redgrave's riveting interpretation. But regardless of how it's classified, this is unmissable theater."

For Clive Barnes, of the New York Post, the evening offered, "a cauterizing performance by Vanessa Redgrave staged with simple, graveyard clarity by David Hare." He readily admits, "unlike many, I'm not a particular admirer of Didion's prose style - its careful elegance and calculated irony have always struck me as clever, precious and rather shallow." However, he thought, "Redgrave and Hare have created a starkly honest theatrical miracle out of Didion's text." Finally, for Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News, "this was a theatrical experience you will never forget." But, even he thinks, "the play isn't 100% successful. Toward the end, Redgrave as Didion rises from the chair and reads from the original book. It's a strange moment, as if we'd left the theater and had moved to a Barnes & Noble." Yet, he concludes, "those are minor complaints about a play that is as intensely intimate as it is universal."

Photo: Even before the stellar reviews for her bravura performance, the name 'Vanessa Redgrave' over the title had ensured the limited run of "The Year of Magical Thinking" was virtually sold out. (Booth Theater)