Wit: A Play

Wit is that rare beast: art that engages both the heart and the mind. "It is not my intention to give away the plot," Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., announces near the beginning of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "but I think I die at the end. They've given me less than two hours." For two hours, this famed Donne scholar takes center stage, interrupting her doctors, nurses, and students to explicate her own story, its metaphors and conceits. Recently diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, she is being treated with an experimental drug cocktail administered in "eight cycles. Eight neat little strophes." The chemo makes her feel worse than she ever thought possible; in fact, the treatment is making her sick, not the disease--an irony she says she'd appreciate in a Donne sonnet, if not so much in life. 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 “Among the finest plays of the decade . . . An original and urgent work of art.” ― David Lyons, The Wall Street Journal “A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day.” ― John Simon, New York magazine “[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.” ― Peter Marks, The New York Times “A one-of-a-kind experience: wise, thoughtful, witty and wrenching.” ― Vincent Canby, The New York Times Year in Review “A thrilling, exciting evening in the theater . . . [Wit is] an extraordinary and most moving play.” ― Clive Barnes, New York Post “Wit is exquisite . . . an exhilarating and harrowing 90-minute revelation.” ―Linda Winer, Newsday “Edson writes superbly . . . [A] moving, enthralling and challenging experience that reminds you what theater is for.” ― Fintan O'Toole, New York Daily News From the Publisher Now the basis for an HBO film starring Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Atkins, Audra McDonald, Jonathan Woodward, and Harold Pinter, and directed by Mike Nichols, airing in March and April 2001. Margaret Edson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1961. She has degrees in history and literature. She wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit in 1991, after a period spent working as a clerk in the oncology/AIDS department of a Washington hospital in 1985. Edson now lives in Atlanta, where she teaches kindergarten. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. (VIVIAN BEARING walks on the empty stage pushing her IV pole. She is fifty, tall and very thin, barefoot, and completely bald. She wears two hospital gowns-one tied in the front and one tied in the back-a baseball cap, and a hospital ID bracelet. The house lights are at half strength. VIVIAN looks out at the audience, sizing them up.) VIVIAN - (In false familiarity, waving and nodding to the audience) Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. That's just great. (In her own professorial tone) This is not my standard greeting, I assure you. I tend toward something a little more formal, a little less inquisitive, such as say, "Hello." But it is the standard greeting here. There is some debate as to the correct response to this salutation. Should one reply "I feel good," using "feel" as a copulative to link the subject, "I," to its subjective complement, "good" ; or "I feel well," modifying with an adverb the subject's state of being? I don't know. I am a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. So I just say, "Fine." Of course it is not very often that I do feel fine. I have been asked "How are you feeling today?" while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice, "How are you feeling today?" I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead. I'm a little sorry I'll miss that. Copyright 1999 Margaret Edson Read more