Wit, A Play
   Margaret Edson
  1999 Faber & Faber, NY USA
   ISBN: 0571198775


Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned English professor, has spent her life specializing in John Donne's Holy Sonnets about death & dying. Now she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. During the course of her illness, as her doctor's unwitting research guinea pig, she comes to reassess her life & work with humor & insights.

When the play opens, Vivian Bearing, Ph. D., is a woman in control of her life & at the top of her profession, which is 17th century metaphysical poetry - a brilliantly difficult cerebral vocation. She is proud of her razor sharp deductive mind & her single-minded dedication to this arcane subject which has kept her far above the madding crowd as a spinster without family.

Dr. Bearing is determined to bear-up under the onslaught of this insidious disease that is already in Stage 4 & is going to defeat whatever pernicious side-effects of the protocols her oncologist dreams up.

Being a woman of words, she muses upon every one that is tossed her way by her research doctor, his avid fellow-in-resident & attending technicians. While they are telling her what their textbooks infer, she is listening to what their language imply. Therein lies the humor & the pathos!

As Dr. Bearing survives all eight courses of chemotherapy, getting weaker, losing her hair & her mind, she remembers the exact moment when she knew her life would be about words. She remembers the way her father taught her the meaning of words, her ingenuous early years at college & her wrestle with the words of her icon, John Donne. Like the good daughter & student she strove to be, she rises to the challenges her oncologist casts at her, to make it through this torture with stiff upper lip & flaming pride.

Even as she endures the impersonal gawking of research doctors & their students she evaluates their teaching methods & their students' efforts, remembering her own methods of teaching & her own attitude to her students. Yet to this woman of words, whenever she is asked how she feels, she is immoderately polite & reticent only uttering that fatuous monosyllable: “Fine!”

Vivian Bearing begins to allow Nurse Susie into her rarified realm; receiving this compassionate caregiver's comfort & wisdom with gentle if surprised humor. Slowly & with excruciating clarity & wit, she realizes that her life is over & that there is no one to come to her in her final hours.

In those all-consuming episodes of agony, when the cancer is eating away at her very bones, the words by which she has lived her entire life, are reduced to agonizing utterances & stainless steel irony. As Nurse Susie speaks to her of ordinary things like popsicles & decisions about life & death, the great Holy Sonnets emerge from the metaphysical into the very real world of her life.

I had forgotten how immediate & powerful are the distilled words of a play. I was impressed & profoundly moved by Margaret Edson's Wit. A valiant woman's ultimate struggle against an inevitable fate. That this heroine steps toward The Light with her consciousness in tatters & her wit intact is an uplifting & hopeful metaphor for us women of words.

The “action” in this play is all in the mind, although what Susie the Nurse, the oncologist, his prize pupil & the technicians do & say pack this play with power & mouth-gaping drama.

Wit has been made into a film for HBO & will be aired in April 2001. Produced by Mike Nichols & starring one of my favorite actresses, Emma Thompson, Wit has come to a medium where everywoman can see & feel & be empowered by this learnèd lady's example. I recommend you experience Wit - it will surely change your life!

Margaret Edson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is an elementary school teacher. Between earning degrees in history & literature, she worked in the cancer & AIDS unit of a research hospital. Wit is her first play.
(04/08/01)

Rebecca