Wit: A Play

Throughout, Vivian finds, the doctors study and discuss her body like a text: "Once I did the teaching, now I am taught. This is much easier. I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time." As her time draws to a close, a sea change begins to work in the way Vivian thinks about life, death, and indeed, Donne. His complex, tightly knotted poems have always been a puzzle for her formidable intellect, a chance to display "verbal swordplay" and wit. Her sickness presents an entirely different challenge. A powerful, prickly personality, capable of dry asides even during a bout of gut-wrenching nausea ("You may remark that my vocabulary has taken a turn for the Anglo-Saxon"), Vivian develops a new appreciation for the simple, the maudlin, the kind. Not to give away the plot, but the final moments in Margaret Edson's debut are as wrenching--as human--as anything in recent drama. --Mary Park

Product Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award

Margaret Edson’s powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence’s unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.”

In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?

The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s
writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any
interested reader.

As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has
spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the
seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly
painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded
values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

I'm both a cancer patient and a playwright, and I can only hope that I'm able to produce as eloquent and powerful a work as Margaret Edson has given us.


What Not To Do and Why To Do It Anyway   May 24, 2003
Kevin L. Nenstiel (Kearney, Nebraska)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

Playwright Margaret Edson does everything in this play that playwrighting and directing teachers tell their students not to do. She speaks in jargon. She breaks the fourth wall. She demands a hefty cast. She's digressive.

Yet the play, both in performance and as literature, is compelling. This play, in the great expressionist style, creates a world as seen through the eyes of only one character. Events unfold from a distinct point of view that is made comprehensible to us by allowing that POV to address us apart from stage events.

Edson, a literature graduate and former oncology ward worker, is knowledgeable about the topics that inform this play: classic poetry and cancer. The connection between the metaphysical lyrics of John Donne and the imminent mortality of uterine cancer provide a smooth harmony in the character of Dr. Vivian Bearing. Thematically and structurally, this play has the theatrical elements that make playwrights from Sophocles to Strindburg to Sam Shepard writers of great significance.

This isn't to say the play is easy to stage. Scene shifts take place without a pause to let actors get their feet. Our narrator gets a pelvic exam in full view of the audience. Supporting characters double on the fly, and lead characters have to change ages from scene to scene. At the final moments, our narrator appears in front of us as naked as the day she was born.

But these difficult elements contribute to the great meaning that is this play. Without these trials, the production wouldn't touch us in the same way. We need these almost offensive structural components to understand what the narrator must endure.

This play is difficult to read, difficult to stage, difficult to watch. Yet the things that make it difficult make it most ultimately rewarding. A modern classic from a forward-thinking mind.


Great play   October 30, 1999
22 out of 24 found this review helpful

Dr. Vivian Bearing is renowned throughout the literary world for her expertise on John Donne's seventh century Holy Sonnets. The professor enjoys teaching at the University, but not as much as she relishes a rational analysis of Donne's brilliant work.

However, the fiftyish Vivian soon learns that she suffers from late stage ovarian cancer. The University medical research staff provide her a rare opportunity to receive special experimental treatment. She soon finds herself feeling sicker from the "cure" than the disease even as she discovers that it is simpler to learn than to teach. As Vivian goes through the eight stage process, she begins to appreciate the Donne sonnets as simple works of art by a great metaphysical poet, and not just intellectual fodder to be ripped asunder by English teachers like her.

W;T is an incredible play that forces the audience (reader or attendee) to evaluate ones values. The main theme is brutally honest yet done in a humorous, thought provoking manner. Margaret Edson provides one of the top plays of the decade as it leaves everyone agreeing it deserved the Pulitzer it won. This play (in book or theater form) needs to be experienced to understand the emotions its generates. Great work by a master playwright.


Beyond Belief   November 29, 2002
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

I have never read such a beautiful play. Margaret Edson writes an intelligent treatment of a highly gifted John Donne scholar, Vivian Bearing, who enters a new life situation and finds herself completely inept spiritually. The new plane of existence is terminal cancer. If you are looking for an engaging plot, don't buy or read this play. This is a drama for the mind.

The play is also extremely witty (no pun intended). It's worldview is basically Christian, because of its resounding affirmation of the goodness of human life, and the brutalities wreaked by self-centredness. This drama also deals with the issue of what constitutes good scholarship. Is good scholarship just a "way of quantifying the complexities of the puzzle" (in the words of the young post-doc researcher, Jason Posner), or does good scholarship give us a vital way of answering old questions?

This is also a play in praise of simplicity. When Vivian Bearing is on her deathbed, she recoils in horror at the thought of her old professor reciting one of the Holy Sonnets. Instead, the wizened old professor reads Vivian a children's story, a little "allegory of the soul: Wherever you go God will find it." God finds Vivian's soul, but only after she has been stripped of her old pretentions and arrogance. I have never read such a beautiful literary depiction of genuine spiritual conversion (with the possible exception of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov).

You cannnot call yourself a well-read person unless you've read this play. This drama will be read for centuries hence. You can also buy a good film version on Amazon, which was released in 2000, casting Emma Thompson as Vivian Bearing (one of her best roles, I believe), and the lovely, talented Audra McDonald as her primary nurse.


Read it, see it, be transformed!   September 12, 2000
Dan Barksdale III
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Wit. A perfect name for a perfect play, yes, perfect! Margaret Edson's first foray into theater is a masterpiece which, she'll probably never out-do, but who cares. If you get a chance to see the play, do so, sell your teeth if you have to. I saw it at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco with Judith Light. What a powerful show! I had no idea what I was going to see, I walked out of the theatre, transformed. From the very start of the play when she says, "It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end." We know she's a force. Then at the end, when she finally throws away all the metaphysical conceit, the bantering about, and the complications of the meaning of life. When she finally adopts simplicity and kindness. When she throws off the IV, catheter, the cap covering her bald head, her hospital ID bracelet, and her gowns, and stands naked before us, reaching up, transformed. We know it's never to late, to change, to be transformed. And we find that in fact, along with Vivian, we are indeed transformed. We need to be loving, caring, and cherish what and who we have, and we know we will. We're gentler, better, transformed.

Vivian Bearing, a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, has stage four, metastatic, ovarian cancer; there is no stage five. She's in the hospital throughout the play except in flashbacks to her college years, her childhood years, and her teaching years. She is a no-nonsense woman, steeping her life in the intricacies of metaphysical poetry. In her field she is "a force." We know she's a force because we can see it, or read it from the time she walks out on stage. Immeasureably strong, she learns that it is never to late to learn a lesson, to undergo a change, to be transformed. Even if one has stage four, metastatic, ovarian cancer. She has no friends, has never been exposed to human kindness, has never shown human kindness. Bearing is a Scrooge-like characters who becomes her own ghosts, and she, and we, are transformed. Enchanted.

The insensitivity of the doctors is accurate, but not the point, the question in philosophical: Why do we do what we do? Why do we make the choices we make? The eternal Why? There wasn't a dry eye in the theatre when Vivian Bearing gave the nurse half of her popsicle, finally, learning how to love. To give. To live. As Bearing says herself, "Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit. Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness." That's right it is, thank you Vivian, It's time to go. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.