Wit: A Play by Margaret Edson
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Book Reviews of Wit: A Play
Book Review: What Not To Do and Why To Do It Anyway
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: W;t is moving & enlightening!
Summary: 5 Stars
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 & a spinster without family.Being a woman of words, she muses upon every one that is tossed her way by her oncologist, his avid pupil & attending technicians. While they are telling her what their textbooks infer, she is listening to what their language implies. Therein lies the humor & the pathos!
Even as she endures the impersonal gawking of research doctors & their students she evaluates their teaching methods & their students' efforts, remembering her own method of teaching & her own attitude toward 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!"
W;t 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, W;t has come to a medium where everywoman can see & feel & be empowered by this learned lady's example. Made me think long on how we learn is how we teach; what would I do & be like were I to face this form of exit & keeping my wits about me.
I recommend you experience Wit - it will surely change your life! Do check out my full review & catch it on TV: as with taxes, death does come to us all, it's how we face it that makes Wit brilliant!
Book Review: Must read, from both sides of the fence
Summary: 5 Stars
Originally saw the play performed at Kennedy Center. Unfortunately, I missed some essential aspects of the (primarily) monologue due to the overt reactions of members of the audience around me. Judith Light was embarking on John Donne's version of wit, and I was holding the hand of the sobbing man next to me (my husband was holding my other hand, and had a few teary moments as well). My husband recognized his own need for further understanding of "w;t" as well as my own wish for comprehension, so he purchased the screenplay and we both read it.Cynics are welcome to react with the generic approach to research, and oncology's dispassionate involvement between physician and patient. For those of us who have braved the ordeal of loving a professor, a physician, a mother, a father, a child, a friend, a neighbor, a professional and/or a technician, I dare say that everyone of us has known at least one other who has undergone the transformation from one state of being to succumbing to the state of being that is succinctly titled as: cancer patient.
"W;t" does not mire anyone in the lonliness that is the 50 year old professor with no immediate family and whose main claim to fame is her incredible knowledge of the famed poet John Dunne. For those of us who have read and been moved by "Death Be Not Proud," Dunne has already touched our lives (for me, it was required reading in seventh grade). What I missed in the theater production, I received twice again in the reading of the screenplay.
I laud all who created what is "W;t" and only pity those who choose to neglect it.
Book Review: No wonder it won a Pulitzer
Summary: 5 Stars
Wit was recommended as a staff pick at my local library. Thank goodness! I doubt I would have found it otherwise, since I don't generally read play scripts.
Even though I'm an old English major from way back, I never studied John Donne's poetry in depth. The way Edson weaves the poetry with Vivian Bearing's growing realization that Donne spoke to her on an intimate level - what after all could be more intimate than the process of dying? - led me to examine some of my own preconceived notions of mortality and its relationship to the immortal.
That last paragraph of mine makes it sound as if this is heavy reading. Not at all! It is a multi-layered work, both grim and light, both stark and richly peopled. I loved the humor, the most notable of which is the line near the end, when Vivian is receiving a dose of morphine for her excruciating pain. She says that she wonders if the morphine will have a soporific effect. "I don't know about that," says her nurse, "but it sure does make you sleepy."
I took a chance and rented the Emma Thompson DVD. I don't trust movies ever to live up to the books they're based on - but I truly wondered how they'd handle a film version. I recommend the movie thoroughly, for it remains true to Edson's quirky way of blending past and present, ignoring the stuffy fourth wall that so many playwrights insist on.
WIT is witty. WIT is sad. WIT is a must-read.
And just wait till you find out why the I in WIT is (on the cover of the book) a semi-colon.
Book Review: Unbelieveably close to home
Summary: 5 Stars
Having witnessed the slow death of my mother from congestive heart failure and emphasyma, "Wit" brought home to me (with a gut sucker-punch) all of my own ordeal, not through MY experience, but through my mother's. Watching this, it was as though the writer, the director and Ms. Thompson (is there a FINER actress on the planet right now?) had mined my mother's brain unbeknownst to me as she lay dying in a hospital in order to show me - compassionately, humanely yet SO dramatically and angonizingly - the other side of death. One might have titled it "The Other Side of Dying".
One watches loved ones die and one is concentrated upon one's own grief and feelings; "Wit" takes you over the fence, makes you trod the ground over which the dying patient walks with increasingly faltering steps, right up until the end. "Wit" is not easy viewing; but - from the agonies of its main character, to the ineptutide and shocking lack of compassion by all the medical staff save Audra McDonald's character - it is necessary viewing in a time when insurance and the medical community say they care, but don't act as though they do. One is reminded that "pure research" can never be such, because its results flow from the faults and frailties of the human body and experience. A tour de force performance from a first-rate cast.