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Wit
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.
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.
85 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Margaret Edson
8 books37 followersMargaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961. She earned degrees in history and literature, and she has been a public school teacher since 1992. Her play Wit won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. The play has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages, and the HBO version won the Emmy Award for best film in 2001. She lives with her family in Atlanta and teaches sixth-grade social studies at Inman Middle School.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 825 reviews
February 8, 2017
I am going to refrain from giving this stars (a practice I am trying out.)
There are already some really good reviews on gr. I am not going to thoroughly review the play, but I do want to say a bit about my ambivalent response.
This is a play narrated by a woman dying of metastatic cancer. Before getting sick she was a hard-core academic and her focus was 17th century poetry, particularly John Donne. She has very little access to emotional connection. She intellectualizes just about everything. And before getting sick, she was uncompromising and inflexible. Moreover, it seems she had zero friends.
What I think both makes this play work and also, at the same time, kind of unravels its power, is the structure. There are a lot of echoing themes. The Bunny books by Margaret Wise Brown. The poetry of John Donne. Vivian's emotional spininess. The doctors' coldness and the nurse's warmth. They sort of produce an emotional reaction, but I found mine fizzled out into a bit of frustration.
Basically, while I appreciate very much that this play addresses the utter failure of doctors to treat patients compassionately, and while I appreciate the ways that it tries to explore the question of institutional expectations versus human connection, I also find it relies too heavily on stereotypes and formal repetitions. It's a little like I'm been force fed my peas and carrots.
Moreover, and more importantly, I was really freaking icked-out by the whole nurse being the intellectually inferior but emotionally care-takey character. My biggest fear, reading it, was that someone would cast the nurse as the wise black female archetype whose job it is in American cultural productions to emotionally support the poor old white woman and serve as a bridge to her emotional world.
And, well, I looked at the movie cast just out of curiosity (while writing this today -- I read the play yesterday) and what do you know, that's exactly what happened in the film version. Ugh.
Maybe I would find this play a little more tolerable if the casting were to undermine some of the banal crepe. How about cast a woman of color as Vivian. Have the nurse be a white guy. (A boy named Sue.) I don't know. But as things are, I'm not so excited about the play.
That said, I am glad I read it. And glad I read the reviews of some folks who really liked it. Who felt comforted by a play that spoke to their experiences of loss and illness.
And reading the play reminded me of how much I enjoy reading scripts (plays, film scripts) and writing them, too.
So, this play is a mixed bag. There are things to admire in it and many things, also, to rail against. And so I do both. And prepare to read some plays by Mishima. And this is where my review ends.
There are already some really good reviews on gr. I am not going to thoroughly review the play, but I do want to say a bit about my ambivalent response.
This is a play narrated by a woman dying of metastatic cancer. Before getting sick she was a hard-core academic and her focus was 17th century poetry, particularly John Donne. She has very little access to emotional connection. She intellectualizes just about everything. And before getting sick, she was uncompromising and inflexible. Moreover, it seems she had zero friends.
What I think both makes this play work and also, at the same time, kind of unravels its power, is the structure. There are a lot of echoing themes. The Bunny books by Margaret Wise Brown. The poetry of John Donne. Vivian's emotional spininess. The doctors' coldness and the nurse's warmth. They sort of produce an emotional reaction, but I found mine fizzled out into a bit of frustration.
Basically, while I appreciate very much that this play addresses the utter failure of doctors to treat patients compassionately, and while I appreciate the ways that it tries to explore the question of institutional expectations versus human connection, I also find it relies too heavily on stereotypes and formal repetitions. It's a little like I'm been force fed my peas and carrots.
Moreover, and more importantly, I was really freaking icked-out by the whole nurse being the intellectually inferior but emotionally care-takey character. My biggest fear, reading it, was that someone would cast the nurse as the wise black female archetype whose job it is in American cultural productions to emotionally support the poor old white woman and serve as a bridge to her emotional world.
And, well, I looked at the movie cast just out of curiosity (while writing this today -- I read the play yesterday) and what do you know, that's exactly what happened in the film version. Ugh.
Maybe I would find this play a little more tolerable if the casting were to undermine some of the banal crepe. How about cast a woman of color as Vivian. Have the nurse be a white guy. (A boy named Sue.) I don't know. But as things are, I'm not so excited about the play.
That said, I am glad I read it. And glad I read the reviews of some folks who really liked it. Who felt comforted by a play that spoke to their experiences of loss and illness.
And reading the play reminded me of how much I enjoy reading scripts (plays, film scripts) and writing them, too.
So, this play is a mixed bag. There are things to admire in it and many things, also, to rail against. And so I do both. And prepare to read some plays by Mishima. And this is where my review ends.
November 19, 2017
A moving Pulitzer award-winning brilliant play by Margaret Edson (born 1961). A dying highly respected poetry professor specializing on John Donne works. The professor is diagnosed with stage 4 (there is no stage 5) ovarian cancer and she is expected to die in few days. The play chronicles her last few hours on earth. She is visited by her former professor who offers to read her a John Donne poem. She declines so her visitor pulls out a children’s book she just brought for her great-grandson’s birthday: Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny. The reader will easily spot the connection of the poem to the one the professor’s father read to her when she was a young girl: Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies that made me her interested on the reading. When she learned the power of words. When she learned that soporific means inducing or tending to induce sleep.
On her last few days on earth, the professor analyzes her life especially the use of wit through the metaphysical poems of John Donne. I had to look up the meaning of wit in metaphysical poems and I did not know who John Donne was and that’s the beauty of reading: you get to exposed to more things and learn new things in the process. So, I held on. “Wit” is a form of intellectual humour and a wit is someone skilled in making witty remarks. Forms of wit are the “quip” and “repartee.” So, in the story, it is still the professor, Vivian who is the wit and she is still able to make some funny remarks to the other characters or in her thoughts. However, the irony of it all is that there is no one visiting her as she has no known relatives (orphan, single, childless) and no friends (career-oriented) at school.
The play is another eye-opener in terms of what is really important in one’s life. On one’s last day on earth, nobody has ever said: I wish I had spent more days in the office. Me as a wit: What if on my last day and I say this, will I be put in the Guinness Book of Records and will people stop uttering this much-used sentence?
The play is short. One-act. One continuous setting: hospital. It used and Edson probably believes this one Shakespeare line (that of Polonius in Hamlet) that I knew since many years back: Brevity is the soul of wit. Me as a wit: So I am keeping this review short.
On her last few days on earth, the professor analyzes her life especially the use of wit through the metaphysical poems of John Donne. I had to look up the meaning of wit in metaphysical poems and I did not know who John Donne was and that’s the beauty of reading: you get to exposed to more things and learn new things in the process. So, I held on. “Wit” is a form of intellectual humour and a wit is someone skilled in making witty remarks. Forms of wit are the “quip” and “repartee.” So, in the story, it is still the professor, Vivian who is the wit and she is still able to make some funny remarks to the other characters or in her thoughts. However, the irony of it all is that there is no one visiting her as she has no known relatives (orphan, single, childless) and no friends (career-oriented) at school.
The play is another eye-opener in terms of what is really important in one’s life. On one’s last day on earth, nobody has ever said: I wish I had spent more days in the office. Me as a wit: What if on my last day and I say this, will I be put in the Guinness Book of Records and will people stop uttering this much-used sentence?
The play is short. One-act. One continuous setting: hospital. It used and Edson probably believes this one Shakespeare line (that of Polonius in Hamlet) that I knew since many years back: Brevity is the soul of wit. Me as a wit: So I am keeping this review short.
October 4, 2018
We are always scrambling for what gives our time meaning and how that relates with what gives our lives meaning. W;t captures all the scrambling. It exposes the truth that I feel in my gut--all this cleverness isn't taking clever people as far as they would like--and still we continue being clever.
Vivian Bearing is a professor of English who teaches a the magnificently complex poetry of John Donne. She is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and tackles this challenge the same way she critical analyzes poetry. However, the subject that she analyses is her life and it is impossible to objectively assess one's life without being influenced by that assessment.
Margaret Edson skillfully explores the question of whether wit gives life meaning through three layers--John Donne's poem, Vivian Bearing's monologues, and the whole plot of the play. The plot suggest that this question eluded any though because it was taken as given in Vivan's childhood. The sheer wit of the Vivian's reassessment is delightful and ironic because Edson is writing about the limits of W;t. In an interview, Edson says about John Donne's poetry, "...the fun of catching it is greater than the benefit of the insight to be gained". I suspect she would say so of wit. I also suspect there is a fourth layer to the ostensible thesis of the play--Edson's life.
Margaret Edson was born and brought up in Washington, DC, went to elite educational institutions and moved to Iowa, where here sister lived. She sold hot dogs by day and bartended by night. Eventually she returned to DC and worked as a clerk in an AIDS and cancer treatment of a hospital. Between her work at the hospital and enrollment in a PhD program at Georgetown, Edson wrote her only published play and it ended up winning the Pulitzer. After she received her graduate degree she became and remains a public school teacher. I cannot shake off the feeling that Margaret Edson is what Vivian Bearing would be if she hadn't died at the end of this play.
W;t reinforces my notion that what gives life meaning maybe death, but it's certainly not wit.
--
October 3, 2018
Vivian Bearing is a professor of English who teaches a the magnificently complex poetry of John Donne. She is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and tackles this challenge the same way she critical analyzes poetry. However, the subject that she analyses is her life and it is impossible to objectively assess one's life without being influenced by that assessment.
Margaret Edson skillfully explores the question of whether wit gives life meaning through three layers--John Donne's poem, Vivian Bearing's monologues, and the whole plot of the play. The plot suggest that this question eluded any though because it was taken as given in Vivan's childhood. The sheer wit of the Vivian's reassessment is delightful and ironic because Edson is writing about the limits of W;t. In an interview, Edson says about John Donne's poetry, "...the fun of catching it is greater than the benefit of the insight to be gained". I suspect she would say so of wit. I also suspect there is a fourth layer to the ostensible thesis of the play--Edson's life.
Margaret Edson was born and brought up in Washington, DC, went to elite educational institutions and moved to Iowa, where here sister lived. She sold hot dogs by day and bartended by night. Eventually she returned to DC and worked as a clerk in an AIDS and cancer treatment of a hospital. Between her work at the hospital and enrollment in a PhD program at Georgetown, Edson wrote her only published play and it ended up winning the Pulitzer. After she received her graduate degree she became and remains a public school teacher. I cannot shake off the feeling that Margaret Edson is what Vivian Bearing would be if she hadn't died at the end of this play.
W;t reinforces my notion that what gives life meaning maybe death, but it's certainly not wit.
--
October 3, 2018
January 1, 2022
Wow. This was overwhelming, and a bit too close to home for me, both because of my own experience and knowing what my dad must have been feeling as he faced death. Edson has sharp insight, often nailing my own feelings of isolation and desperation during the cancer treatment experience. The only thing that didn't speak to me was the very end, but that is just my own skepticism about an afterlife; it is beautifully written and a good ending.
One of the things that struck me was the appropriateness of names; Vivian BEARING is the patient, she bears not only the disease but also the medical workers' treatment. The resident is Dr. POSNER, and she describes him as inept, a research who is just posing as a dr. to make the rounds. And Dr. Kelekian's name is curiously familiar to me, like Dr. Kevorkian.
Her wit is on full display, and you are (or at least I was) immediately sympathetic with the character. It made me laugh out loud and gasp. For instance, her wit: "I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time." (p. 37). And her humanity: "It came so quickly, after taking so long. Not even time for a proper conclusion." (p. 72).
One of the things that struck me was the appropriateness of names; Vivian BEARING is the patient, she bears not only the disease but also the medical workers' treatment. The resident is Dr. POSNER, and she describes him as inept, a research who is just posing as a dr. to make the rounds. And Dr. Kelekian's name is curiously familiar to me, like Dr. Kevorkian.
Her wit is on full display, and you are (or at least I was) immediately sympathetic with the character. It made me laugh out loud and gasp. For instance, her wit: "I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time." (p. 37). And her humanity: "It came so quickly, after taking so long. Not even time for a proper conclusion." (p. 72).
December 20, 2021
Dr. Vivian Bearing, professor of 17th century poetry and John Dunne scholar, has been diagnosed with stage 4 Ovarian Cancer. What we see is her in her final days dealing with death and seeing her in flashbacks as a child, a student, and an inflexible professor who doesn't show kindness to her students.
This one-act play was recommended by my girlfriend. I haven't read a play since my senior year of high school in 1998 (The Crucible). It was easy to read, but the analysis of Donne's work went a little over my head, as I'm unfamiliar with his work. There seemed to be some character growth and it calls attention to how patients can often feel like experiments in hospitals instead of people.
This one-act play was recommended by my girlfriend. I haven't read a play since my senior year of high school in 1998 (The Crucible). It was easy to read, but the analysis of Donne's work went a little over my head, as I'm unfamiliar with his work. There seemed to be some character growth and it calls attention to how patients can often feel like experiments in hospitals instead of people.
February 5, 2009
This is a five star book that I don't feel the need to ever see again, which then makes it a four star book. Yeah that makes no sense. deal.
it is a nice criticism of the medical system, and the university system in general I would say.
It's not a peach, but it's probably a plum.
it is a nice criticism of the medical system, and the university system in general I would say.
It's not a peach, but it's probably a plum.
July 1, 2015
کتاب رو رحیم قاسمیان با عنوان زیرکی ترجمه کرده و انتشارات نیلا هم چاپش کرده. نمایش نامه کوتاه و قشنگیه که چند روز از زندگی یه استاد ادبیات رو که سرطان گرفته و تحت معالجه است نشون میده.
June 25, 2024
GOOD GRIEF. I mean that fully. This is an extraordinary look at the final moments of life, precise as a medical record and beautiful as a poem. A dying Donne scholar becomes aware of her physical body and must reckon with the metaphysical puzzles that consumed her mind her whole life. Profound, brief (I read it in one glorious stretch seated on a pool deck), and clever, Wit is everything KSP promised me it would be.
And you’re telling me it was written in 1991 by a woman who won the Pulitzer and then has been an elementary school teacher ever since? I’m in complete awe.
And you’re telling me it was written in 1991 by a woman who won the Pulitzer and then has been an elementary school teacher ever since? I’m in complete awe.
November 15, 2023
“It has always been my custom to treat words with respect. I can recall the time--the very hour of the very day--when I knew words would be my life's work.”
What a fascinating play. The story and its message was, without a doubt, beautifully brutal. I mean it’s been hours since I finished reading it and I’m still thinking about all of its intricacies.
Read for my English class (really excited to write about it)
July 29, 2020
I'm not the suavest person when it comes to plays. Growing up on a diet of soundtracks derived from musicals, operas, ballets, and symphonies has trained my brain to expect accordingly whenever a stage comes into view; and while I've since then been fed, voluntarily or otherwise, a steady stream of Shakespeare & co. scripts and done plenty of analysis subsequently, it's not the same as the actual thing. In adulthood, I have a great deal more freedom to actively pursue said actual thing (difficult during these quarantine days, but you know what I mean), but it's still so much easier for me to track down a text and content myself with a promise to, one day, witness the performance for myself. This is probably why a play like this, bold and brash and focused around one of the white suburban pathos-triggers (is it even possible to use that last word without getting political anymore, I wonder) that I railed against so much in a previous review, succeeded so well with me: I really do need it boiled down into that sort of straightforward, borderline treacle-tarted, delivery to feel like I 'get' it, or at least appreciate it. It doesn't hurt that the main crux of this play also entails a great deal of ye olde literature nerdisms, as well as the fact that this play's playwright's own queer status allows me to read a great deal into the unmarried, and pretty much isolated, state of the main woman professor character. In short, I liked this play, and that is honestly something I didn't expect to happen.
The fact that this a relatively modern prize winning piece of US literature goes hand in hand with it being a rather rabid evocation of Christianity if one views it in a certain light, so I don't blame anyone who doesn't adhere to such beliefs for finding it tedious. I myself haven't participated in the more overt rituals or structures for some time now, but the indoctrination's hard to shake off when the holidays are respected and the aesthetics are insidiously rampant and the morality strictures so frequently go unspoken that uprooting them is quite the trial. So, while I'm not anything more than a mild appreciator of the English religious poet Donne under the right circumstances, I do know quite a bit about existential terror, especially the kind filtered through the Catholicism of my upbringing. I also know something about academia, and women in academia, and brilliant women in academia, to the point that it doesn't surprise me that Edson won the Pulitzer Prize and has stayed in a life well away from the bombastic tomfoolery of wannabe literary celebrities ever since. Would this work have won a Pulitzer if a distanced partner and/or wife had come into the dying woman's bed for a final burst of compassion, rather than a former woman professor? Remember, one usually has to be a family member for such, and not all relationships are created equal. A quarter of a century later, same-sex marriage still manages to be a thing in my country, and I currently await a second season of a glorious historical wlw romp based on an the encoded diaries of an enterprising (and odiously stuffy, if I'm being perfectly honest) lesbian landowner. I also regularly run into traces of radfems attempting to finish the destruction of queer history that AIDS exponentially magnified, the continuation of a white supremacist, supposedly homophile movement whose ideologies and power structures markedly mimic those of the Catholic Church. Disturbing times, then, alongside the hope of what is and continues to be won, but that's 2020 for you, isn't it.
This is the final work read for my Reading Women Bingo 2020 challenge, which I've been hosting over at the 500 GBBW group for this past year. After that comes Women in Translation Month 2020, during which I will both finish my master's program and become one year older, and then an undetermined number of months spent working and/or social distancing, the latter preferably far shorter in duration compared to the former. The official end of the year is still quite a ways away, and yet, comparing my memories of what I was looking forward to back in February or March and how events ended up falling out, I feel I've lived a decade of grindingly painful adjustment to one sudden disaster after another in the space of less than six months, and I doubt I'm the only person to feel as such. A negative test result for COVID is certainly no positive one for cancer, but this is one of those times where those who feel the truth of being temporarily able skyrockets in both quantity and intensity, and those of us whose lives were already plagued (ha) with such find ourselves, once again, used as reassurance. Should you get sick, only those with comorbidities will have a real chance of dying, and when you survive of course you'll be perfectly fine and have no chronic conditions to deal with for the rest of your days as consequence of some unmasked someone yelling into your masked, likely rent-earning face. How many Professor Bearings have wasted away on ventilators? How many more have done so without the protection of her ethnicity, her professional status, her unremarked but necessarily assumed to be present health insurance, her hospital room, her life machines, her bed? I've gone quite a few reviews without circling back to present circumstances, but until all of this goes away, it will always be circling back. At this stage, I doubt this situation will ever completely die; if that isn't cancer, I don't know what is.
The fact that this a relatively modern prize winning piece of US literature goes hand in hand with it being a rather rabid evocation of Christianity if one views it in a certain light, so I don't blame anyone who doesn't adhere to such beliefs for finding it tedious. I myself haven't participated in the more overt rituals or structures for some time now, but the indoctrination's hard to shake off when the holidays are respected and the aesthetics are insidiously rampant and the morality strictures so frequently go unspoken that uprooting them is quite the trial. So, while I'm not anything more than a mild appreciator of the English religious poet Donne under the right circumstances, I do know quite a bit about existential terror, especially the kind filtered through the Catholicism of my upbringing. I also know something about academia, and women in academia, and brilliant women in academia, to the point that it doesn't surprise me that Edson won the Pulitzer Prize and has stayed in a life well away from the bombastic tomfoolery of wannabe literary celebrities ever since. Would this work have won a Pulitzer if a distanced partner and/or wife had come into the dying woman's bed for a final burst of compassion, rather than a former woman professor? Remember, one usually has to be a family member for such, and not all relationships are created equal. A quarter of a century later, same-sex marriage still manages to be a thing in my country, and I currently await a second season of a glorious historical wlw romp based on an the encoded diaries of an enterprising (and odiously stuffy, if I'm being perfectly honest) lesbian landowner. I also regularly run into traces of radfems attempting to finish the destruction of queer history that AIDS exponentially magnified, the continuation of a white supremacist, supposedly homophile movement whose ideologies and power structures markedly mimic those of the Catholic Church. Disturbing times, then, alongside the hope of what is and continues to be won, but that's 2020 for you, isn't it.
This is the final work read for my Reading Women Bingo 2020 challenge, which I've been hosting over at the 500 GBBW group for this past year. After that comes Women in Translation Month 2020, during which I will both finish my master's program and become one year older, and then an undetermined number of months spent working and/or social distancing, the latter preferably far shorter in duration compared to the former. The official end of the year is still quite a ways away, and yet, comparing my memories of what I was looking forward to back in February or March and how events ended up falling out, I feel I've lived a decade of grindingly painful adjustment to one sudden disaster after another in the space of less than six months, and I doubt I'm the only person to feel as such. A negative test result for COVID is certainly no positive one for cancer, but this is one of those times where those who feel the truth of being temporarily able skyrockets in both quantity and intensity, and those of us whose lives were already plagued (ha) with such find ourselves, once again, used as reassurance. Should you get sick, only those with comorbidities will have a real chance of dying, and when you survive of course you'll be perfectly fine and have no chronic conditions to deal with for the rest of your days as consequence of some unmasked someone yelling into your masked, likely rent-earning face. How many Professor Bearings have wasted away on ventilators? How many more have done so without the protection of her ethnicity, her professional status, her unremarked but necessarily assumed to be present health insurance, her hospital room, her life machines, her bed? I've gone quite a few reviews without circling back to present circumstances, but until all of this goes away, it will always be circling back. At this stage, I doubt this situation will ever completely die; if that isn't cancer, I don't know what is.
I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see that I have been found out.
October 30, 2012
I first saw the play Wit (it is actually "W;t") in a tiny theater in Philadelphia. I was left speechless at the end, and it lived in my head for weeks. This play is an extraordinary effort for a first time writer.
As a nurse,the story of Vivian Bearing, to me, is a story of kindness, and the lack of it. At the time I read it, I was also teaching and saw the professorial character of Vivian in many of my colleagues. The sense of power over students and the hurt that power exerts is something that academics (some, not all) revel in at times. Vivian lives for the the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, instead of living for the sheer privilege of it. Thus her tragedy.
However, as Ms.Edson so eloquently teaches us, that power and cruelty withers and dies when catastrophic illness leaves us open to every embarrassment, pain, and loneliness. Vivian learned that only caring saves us, and she learned it the hard way, as so many of us do. She craved caring and compassion at her time of vulnerability, but saw no reason to provide it when she had the opportunity to do so. That, above all, is the lesson of this play. They mirror who she was, and she tastes how bitter it can be.
Her spiritual journey toward true humanity is strengthened by her nurse, Susie, the metaphor of love and empathy. She's honest, she's protective, and she loves the vulnerable. Indeed, she is the antithesis of everyone else involved with her, with the exception of her former professor.
I have used this play as a teaching tool for many students, and without exception, I find that they, too, are left spellbound and introspective. It truly is a masterpiece on the stage, where its message is strongest.
As a nurse,the story of Vivian Bearing, to me, is a story of kindness, and the lack of it. At the time I read it, I was also teaching and saw the professorial character of Vivian in many of my colleagues. The sense of power over students and the hurt that power exerts is something that academics (some, not all) revel in at times. Vivian lives for the the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, instead of living for the sheer privilege of it. Thus her tragedy.
However, as Ms.Edson so eloquently teaches us, that power and cruelty withers and dies when catastrophic illness leaves us open to every embarrassment, pain, and loneliness. Vivian learned that only caring saves us, and she learned it the hard way, as so many of us do. She craved caring and compassion at her time of vulnerability, but saw no reason to provide it when she had the opportunity to do so. That, above all, is the lesson of this play. They mirror who she was, and she tastes how bitter it can be.
Her spiritual journey toward true humanity is strengthened by her nurse, Susie, the metaphor of love and empathy. She's honest, she's protective, and she loves the vulnerable. Indeed, she is the antithesis of everyone else involved with her, with the exception of her former professor.
I have used this play as a teaching tool for many students, and without exception, I find that they, too, are left spellbound and introspective. It truly is a masterpiece on the stage, where its message is strongest.
March 15, 2019
مرگ، تو نباید مغرور باشی، گرچه برخی چنین میپندارند
که قدرتمند و هراسناکی، حال آنکه این چنین نیستی،
چون حتا آنان که میپنداری از بین بردهای،
برای همیشه نمردهاند، چون من که نتوانستی برای همیشه نابودهام کنی..
که قدرتمند و هراسناکی، حال آنکه این چنین نیستی،
چون حتا آنان که میپنداری از بین بردهای،
برای همیشه نمردهاند، چون من که نتوانستی برای همیشه نابودهام کنی..
April 10, 2018
“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.
Son zamanlarda çok fazla oyun okumadığımı fark ettim ve bunu değiştirmek istediğimden, Sena'nın önerisiyle Wit'e başladım. Aslında bunu listeme bir süre önce almıştım fakat birkaç gün önce birden başlamak istedim, aklımda hiç yokken. Bitirmem, okul nedeniyle, düşündüğümden uzun sürdü.
Verdiğim puandan da anlayacağınız üzere oyunu epey beğendim. Eğer gidebileceğim bir yerlerde sahneleniyor olsaydı bitirdiğim an bilet bakıyor olurdum. Eminim izlemesi de okuması kadar keyiflidir.
Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.
Vivian, asıl odağı John Donne'un Holy Sonnets'i olan bir akademisyen. Bu nedenle, oyunu okurken, hem geçen dönem Survey of English Literature dersinde John Donne işlediğimiz günleri düşündüm okurken, hem de kendi gelecek planlarımı gözden geçirdim. Bir sonuca varamadım belki ama güzel sorular sorduğumu düşünüyorum.
Öğrencileriyle olan etkileşimlerini hatırladığı kısımlarda ise, kendi öğretmenlerimle olan ilişkilerimi düşünüp kendimi çok şanslı hissettim açıkçası. Aslında Wit'in bana hissettirdiği çok şey var ama, hepsini buraya dökmek hem zor geliyor, hem de anlamsız. Eğer okumaya karar verirseniz benzer duyguları siz hissedeceksinizdir diye düşünüyorum.
The time for extreme measures has come. I am in terrible pain. Susie says that I need to begin aggressive pain management if I am going to stand it.
“It”: such a little word. In this case, I think “it” signifies “being alive.”
Bir ara tekrar okumak ve başka sorular sormak güzel olabilir. Oyunun sonu da çok hoşuma gitti. Jason ve Susie arasındaki sahne, oyunun kapanış anı, bütün bunların kağıda dökülüş biçimi. Okurken sık sık, "Sahneleniyor olsa nasıl olurdu?" diye düşünerek aklımda canlandırmaya çalıştım.
Bana dokunan bir eser oldu. (O kadar ki, anlatmaya çalıştığımda takılıyorum ve ne diyebileceğimi düşündüğümde sadece ekrana boş boş bakıyorum. Hiçbir şey dememiş olmak istemedim, ondan burada bıraksam yeterli olur herhalde.)
January 10, 2008
The 1999 Pulitzer winner for drama. The play focuses on middle-aged college professor, Vivian Bearing, and her struggle with late-stage ovarian cancer. It explores her intellectual, stoic approach to English literature and how that same perspective frames her perspective on her medical fate. That perspective changes as she compares her detached demeanor with that of the impersonal medical researcher who is treating her. This play was rather disappointing on the whole. First, I don’t care for the play’s structure that has Vivian as both the main character and the narrator, and how she goes back and forth with her internal monologues. Second, in a few scenes, the other characters step out of character and interact with her as both patient and narrator, breaking the drama’s assumed reality. Thirdly, the narrator treats the reader/audience like a moron incapable of picking up the major themes of the play; Vivian, for instance, notes casually to herself the irony of the situation of the stoic doctor treating her the same way she treated her students. That irony was clear enough without the exposition, thank you very much. Lastly, the play’s title appears some one million times throughout the dialogue. Ugh. And don’t even get me started with the semicolon in place of the letter “i” in the title. If you’re only reading a few plays this year, don’t make this one of them.
October 8, 2018
from The Book Hooligan
"In truth it is like this: You cannot imagine how time can be so still. It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly. And yet it is so scarce." - Vivian Bearing
In all my 20 or so years in this world I have never paid much attention to punctuation marks. I just know that I use them to end sentences, separate thoughts in a paragraph, and enumerate a number of things in a single sentence. I have never considered the elegant beauty of each punctuation when used in a beautiful and appropriate manner.
However, when I read Wit and came across a certain passage, I realized how poetic and significant a punctuation can be. The passage that I came across reads like this:
In the passage, an exclamation point and a comma is very different that it literally changed the meaning of the poem by John Donne. I loved how it is presented in the play as if death is not something to waste exclamation points upon but just a momentary pause towards eternal life.
Anyway, I am getting too far ahead in my introduction. Wit tells the story of Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English professor in an unnamed university, who specializes in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. She is suffering from Stage IV Ovarian cancer and, at the start of the play, she breaks the fourth wall and directly talks to the audience as she tries to tell the story of her life and the diagnosis of her cancer that led to her present condition. And, because Wit is a short play, Vivian's story is cut down to its most significant moments which is her childhood as she discovers her love for words; her years as a student; and her tenure as a professor.
Wit is driven not by the story or by the conversation by its characters since its length limits the scope of the whole play. Therefore, Wit is driven by the lengthy monologues of Vivian as she struggles to come to terms with her sickness and as she evaluates her life. You see, Vivian is a cold and calculating person that shuns human contact and affection. During her tenure as a professor, we see her scold students with complete disregard of their feelings. Now, on her deathbed, Vivian reconsiders the way that she has lead her life. She now seeks affection in the shadow of death and the only one that can give it to her is her nurse. The doctors consider her as research; the technicians consider her as nuisance; and she has no family or friends to visit her except her former professor who visited her at the end of the play.
Vivian's story is one that is filled with irony (I hope I am not misusing the term) as she once consider such thoughts on the intricacies of death as a puzzle to be solved by a scholarly study on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, one of which reads like this:
All of her life, she studied poems just like the one above which dissects the relationship between man, Death, God, and the afterlife. Now, she is the poetic persona of John Donne's Holy Sonnets as she seeks to solve the mystery of death. She tries to solve it not as a scholarly pursuit but as a shield against her fear of death and as a way to prolong the feeling of hopelessness that a dying person feels. She is using her intelligence to anchor her to the life that she had before she knew that she was dying as a respite from the inevitable.
However, despite the heavy subject matter, Wit has a sense of humor that gives its reader a sense of ease despite the expected death of its protagonists. However, it also removes from the reader the sense of urgency that should be felt in times of death and it becomes too late when you realize that Vivian's pain and suffering cannot support the humor anymore. It became heartbreaking in a flash and the reader is caught off-guard and is forced to face the grim realities of death.
The self-examination that Vivian undergoes tells the audience not about the frightening realities of death but about the immense beauty of life. Her dying is a lesson to everyone how short life is and how we often waste it on shallow things. But it also touches upon how death should not be feared for it is the "comma" or the pause that goes between death and eternal life. No matter what your religious belief is, one cannot miss the beauty of Margaret Edson's imagery about life and death.
At the end of the play, Vivian, who is now almost rendered paralyzed by the pain and the painkillers, is visited by her former graduate professor, E.M. Ashford. Ashford sees Vivian to be in so much pain that she offered to recite something by John Donne. But Vivian, who has been studying John Donne her whole adult life, declines. So, as a substitute, Ashford reads a children's book (which she will give to her grandson) titled The Runaway Bunny. This, I think, is the most beautiful and profound part of the play. Vivian, who is dying, finally accept her fate as she realizes that death is not a something to be solved by a John Donne sonnet but something to be accepted because, like the children's book, death is a simple fact of life.
Indeed, brevity is the soul of wit as this play numbers at less than a hundred pages but despite its length, the play still delivers a profound and beautiful message about life and death. I will gladly recommend this to anyone that is interested about a minimalistic portrayal of a dying woman. Without all the exclamation points and capital letters and, instead, delivers the message through period, commas, and wit.
"In truth it is like this: You cannot imagine how time can be so still. It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly. And yet it is so scarce." - Vivian Bearing
In all my 20 or so years in this world I have never paid much attention to punctuation marks. I just know that I use them to end sentences, separate thoughts in a paragraph, and enumerate a number of things in a single sentence. I have never considered the elegant beauty of each punctuation when used in a beautiful and appropriate manner.
However, when I read Wit and came across a certain passage, I realized how poetic and significant a punctuation can be. The passage that I came across reads like this:
E.M. Ashford: Do you think that the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail? The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with Death calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life death and eternal life. In the edition you choose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation.
E.M. Ashford: And Death, Capital D, shall be no more, semi-colon. Death, Capital D comma, thou shalt die, exclamation mark!
E.M. Ashford: If you go in for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare.
E.M. Ashford: Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript of 1610, not for sentimental reasons I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar.
E.M. Ashford: It reads, "And death shall be no more" comma "death, thou shalt die." Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting.
E.M. Ashford: Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause.
E.M. Ashford: In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semi-colons. Just a comma.
In the passage, an exclamation point and a comma is very different that it literally changed the meaning of the poem by John Donne. I loved how it is presented in the play as if death is not something to waste exclamation points upon but just a momentary pause towards eternal life.
Anyway, I am getting too far ahead in my introduction. Wit tells the story of Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English professor in an unnamed university, who specializes in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. She is suffering from Stage IV Ovarian cancer and, at the start of the play, she breaks the fourth wall and directly talks to the audience as she tries to tell the story of her life and the diagnosis of her cancer that led to her present condition. And, because Wit is a short play, Vivian's story is cut down to its most significant moments which is her childhood as she discovers her love for words; her years as a student; and her tenure as a professor.
Wit is driven not by the story or by the conversation by its characters since its length limits the scope of the whole play. Therefore, Wit is driven by the lengthy monologues of Vivian as she struggles to come to terms with her sickness and as she evaluates her life. You see, Vivian is a cold and calculating person that shuns human contact and affection. During her tenure as a professor, we see her scold students with complete disregard of their feelings. Now, on her deathbed, Vivian reconsiders the way that she has lead her life. She now seeks affection in the shadow of death and the only one that can give it to her is her nurse. The doctors consider her as research; the technicians consider her as nuisance; and she has no family or friends to visit her except her former professor who visited her at the end of the play.
Vivian's story is one that is filled with irony (I hope I am not misusing the term) as she once consider such thoughts on the intricacies of death as a puzzle to be solved by a scholarly study on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, one of which reads like this:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.
All of her life, she studied poems just like the one above which dissects the relationship between man, Death, God, and the afterlife. Now, she is the poetic persona of John Donne's Holy Sonnets as she seeks to solve the mystery of death. She tries to solve it not as a scholarly pursuit but as a shield against her fear of death and as a way to prolong the feeling of hopelessness that a dying person feels. She is using her intelligence to anchor her to the life that she had before she knew that she was dying as a respite from the inevitable.
However, despite the heavy subject matter, Wit has a sense of humor that gives its reader a sense of ease despite the expected death of its protagonists. However, it also removes from the reader the sense of urgency that should be felt in times of death and it becomes too late when you realize that Vivian's pain and suffering cannot support the humor anymore. It became heartbreaking in a flash and the reader is caught off-guard and is forced to face the grim realities of death.
The self-examination that Vivian undergoes tells the audience not about the frightening realities of death but about the immense beauty of life. Her dying is a lesson to everyone how short life is and how we often waste it on shallow things. But it also touches upon how death should not be feared for it is the "comma" or the pause that goes between death and eternal life. No matter what your religious belief is, one cannot miss the beauty of Margaret Edson's imagery about life and death.
At the end of the play, Vivian, who is now almost rendered paralyzed by the pain and the painkillers, is visited by her former graduate professor, E.M. Ashford. Ashford sees Vivian to be in so much pain that she offered to recite something by John Donne. But Vivian, who has been studying John Donne her whole adult life, declines. So, as a substitute, Ashford reads a children's book (which she will give to her grandson) titled The Runaway Bunny. This, I think, is the most beautiful and profound part of the play. Vivian, who is dying, finally accept her fate as she realizes that death is not a something to be solved by a John Donne sonnet but something to be accepted because, like the children's book, death is a simple fact of life.
Indeed, brevity is the soul of wit as this play numbers at less than a hundred pages but despite its length, the play still delivers a profound and beautiful message about life and death. I will gladly recommend this to anyone that is interested about a minimalistic portrayal of a dying woman. Without all the exclamation points and capital letters and, instead, delivers the message through period, commas, and wit.
December 21, 2018
Maybe 4 1/2*.
A very smart ;), moving short play. Pardon the order of the adjectives I used, in case I got it wrong.
Highly recommended.
Thank you, Lavinia. ;)
A very smart ;), moving short play. Pardon the order of the adjectives I used, in case I got it wrong.
Highly recommended.
Thank you, Lavinia. ;)
February 3, 2011
I rarely come across plays as potent as this one. “Wit: a Play” accomplishes some quite incongruous feats: it effectively piques our curiosity for the obscure poetry of a 16th Century John Donne; it disinterestedly instructs us on how modern medicine treats cancer; and yet, it shows the readers how the treatment takes shape at a very personal level. The play let us accompany an austere literature professor, Dr. Vivian Bearing, on her cancerous and catastrophic last days.
Poetry and cancer: the former ethereal and sublime, charged with possibility and sudden epiphany; the latter shadowy and crushing, laden with angst and the inevitable.
The play marries these two contradicting existential strains in the life tale of one highbrow academic, who spent her last days along in a hospital ward, gradually eaten alive by the imminent disease. She sought deliverance from her achievement and her poetry. But both proved powerless to her defense.
The hapless professor, towards the end of the play, eventually found redemption (and maybe even hope!) by returning to the memory of her innocent days when she hadn't yet heard of death, when she had no need for an ego to counter the inevitable, when words still led to pure experience and not to “poetical” abstractions. Recalling those days gave her a contrast, a comparison, a new perspective, and indeed, a new possibility of experience. And that was her redemption.
The play echoes Dr. Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”, in which he let out a scandalous secret -- that all human endeavors at the core are just cover-ups, covering up the fact that someday we will all die. He thinks all that makes up our individuality – achievements, personality, characters, egos, etc., are just attempt to convince ourselves that we are above others, that we are more powerful, that we are predestined to be unique and “exceptional” to the inevitable.
Dr. Becker offers no solution in his book, nor has Margaret Edson, the author, in “Wit: a Play. Yet she does imply a possible solace: that we could find salvation in sympathy, where ego is absent; that we can find redemption in empathy, where sharing pain becomes shared peace. She wants us (through the detour of a play) to arrive at the paradoxical wisdom: that acknowledging vulnerability is the beginning of strength, a strength even powerful enough to face up death.
This play is not an easy read. And I imagine that it would not have been easy to stage it either. But if at the end of reading you find yourself sympathizing with Dr. Vivian Bearing, and seeing a glimpse of yourself in her life, I would say that the book has worth your time.
Poetry and cancer: the former ethereal and sublime, charged with possibility and sudden epiphany; the latter shadowy and crushing, laden with angst and the inevitable.
The play marries these two contradicting existential strains in the life tale of one highbrow academic, who spent her last days along in a hospital ward, gradually eaten alive by the imminent disease. She sought deliverance from her achievement and her poetry. But both proved powerless to her defense.
The hapless professor, towards the end of the play, eventually found redemption (and maybe even hope!) by returning to the memory of her innocent days when she hadn't yet heard of death, when she had no need for an ego to counter the inevitable, when words still led to pure experience and not to “poetical” abstractions. Recalling those days gave her a contrast, a comparison, a new perspective, and indeed, a new possibility of experience. And that was her redemption.
The play echoes Dr. Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”, in which he let out a scandalous secret -- that all human endeavors at the core are just cover-ups, covering up the fact that someday we will all die. He thinks all that makes up our individuality – achievements, personality, characters, egos, etc., are just attempt to convince ourselves that we are above others, that we are more powerful, that we are predestined to be unique and “exceptional” to the inevitable.
Dr. Becker offers no solution in his book, nor has Margaret Edson, the author, in “Wit: a Play. Yet she does imply a possible solace: that we could find salvation in sympathy, where ego is absent; that we can find redemption in empathy, where sharing pain becomes shared peace. She wants us (through the detour of a play) to arrive at the paradoxical wisdom: that acknowledging vulnerability is the beginning of strength, a strength even powerful enough to face up death.
This play is not an easy read. And I imagine that it would not have been easy to stage it either. But if at the end of reading you find yourself sympathizing with Dr. Vivian Bearing, and seeing a glimpse of yourself in her life, I would say that the book has worth your time.
February 5, 2017
I read this today at lunch because I forgot my Kindle at home. I knew the plot--I believe we watched the telefilm in my AP Lit course back when we covered John Donne--but it was still a sucker-punch of a play. Exquisitely written, achingly lonely and sad. The metaphors are so strong without feeling like they bash you over the head with it, which I really appreciated.
In lesser hands, this could've been overly sentimental, or overly black-and-white, and perhaps in some ways it is; the characters are pretty clearly delineated with their sympathies. Jason is too clinical and views Vivian as a research object; Susie is the human compassion. Those are not subtle. But damn if it isn't effective.
I'll probably end up re-reading this at some point, perhaps a little more slowly, and allow myself to cry, rather than just eating a sandwich and sniffling but not crying because I don't have enough paper towels and the only one I have is covered in peanut-butter residue.
In lesser hands, this could've been overly sentimental, or overly black-and-white, and perhaps in some ways it is; the characters are pretty clearly delineated with their sympathies. Jason is too clinical and views Vivian as a research object; Susie is the human compassion. Those are not subtle. But damn if it isn't effective.
I'll probably end up re-reading this at some point, perhaps a little more slowly, and allow myself to cry, rather than just eating a sandwich and sniffling but not crying because I don't have enough paper towels and the only one I have is covered in peanut-butter residue.
March 16, 2023
“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.”
•
Required for English class, and I actually quite enjoyed it. It’s an entertaining one-act play, a very short read, and filled with lots of scholarly words and witty writing!
•
“I will grant that in this particular field of endeavor they possess a more potent arsenal of terminology than I. My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.”
So cool
“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.”
•
Required for English class, and I actually quite enjoyed it. It’s an entertaining one-act play, a very short read, and filled with lots of scholarly words and witty writing!
•
“I will grant that in this particular field of endeavor they possess a more potent arsenal of terminology than I. My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.”
So cool
June 27, 2013
It is definitely a great play. I was constantly thinking on Susan Sontag's Illness and its metaphor. This book is full of wisdom and thinking about life. Whether life is a coma or a semicolon, or it is a wit that's it. These are riddles for human kind, even linguists or literary scholars won't know the answer.
It worths re-reading. And I'm thinking we are all the next.
It worths re-reading. And I'm thinking we are all the next.
August 29, 2018
سه ستاره و نیم در واقع! بعید میدانم نمایشنامهای از دهههای اخیر را بتوانم واقعاً و با رضایت کامل چهار ستارۀ کامل بدهم. اما جدّاً خوب و خواندنی بود، میشود به آن برگشت و بازش خواند، و یک کارگردان زبردست حتماً میتواند اجرای درجه یکی از کار روی صحنه ببرد.
February 2, 2017
This is a brilliant little play juxtaposing cancer and John Donne poetry, which frequently deals with death. Definitely worth the quick read and would be great to see performed.
October 27, 2017
Outstanding book that every writer should read. Breathtaking. Heartbreaking.
December 7, 2023
Makes me cry every time.
March 28, 2018
This particular play won the Pulitzer Prize, and though I seldom read much in terms of contemporary drama [1], it is pretty easy to see why this play won that prize despite being (somehow) the author's first published play. Indeed, looking at this play is instructive in viewing what serves as Pulitzer-bait for other potential playwrights. There is obvious human interest in this story, as it shows a single middle-aged literature professor dying of cancer and reflecting in her solitude on her life. The play is intensely layered, featuring reflections on death in the contemporary world, where one's treatment is the subject of medical research, while also reflecting on the fear of salvation in John Donne's highly witty metaphysical poetry. Indeed, it is pretty clear to see that the play simultaneously seeks to pull on the heartstrings in portraying a lonely and isolated scholar unable to let anyone else while simultaneously appealing to the mind through its intellectual study of the language of doctors, the language of literary scholars, and the language of everyday life. As a result, this play serves as a meaningful and deeply enjoyable reflection on existence and the way in which our passion for words may separate us from others just as surely as communication can bring us together.
This play consists of one more or less continuous scene that runs for about two hours without intermission, although there are clearly segments and flashbacks and the passage of time within the scene as we look at literature professor Vivian Bearing moving from a newly admitted patient with stage four metastatic ovary cancer and a family history of breast cancer to her dramatic death at the end of the play. In between we see Vivian dealing with the language of her doctors and nurses and communicating with them in the absence of loved ones who want to visit her, and coming to terms with her own passion for words and how they worked and the poetry of John Donne, which is ranked as particularly difficult to understand. As Vivian reflects on the way that her love of words has given her a good reputation as an academic but has cut her off from intimacy with other people, the audience is invited to reflect upon themselves and upon their own possible mortality as well, if they are so inclined.
While I have been critical of many of the contemporary writings I have read in terms of their politics and worldview, this play is a firm example of a play that I can relate to on multiple levels. For one, like the playwright and Vivian, I am deeply interested in complex and layered communication and the use of writing for the playing of communication games. For another, like Vivian and possibly John Donne (it is hard to know), I have often used my obvious facility with words and my ferocious wit as a way of making it difficult to get to know me, by making me somewhat unapproachable, a problem we definitely see with regards to Vivian as she endures eight courses of an aggressive monthly chemotherapy regimen only to put herself on no code to the eventual distress and embarrassment of the research doctor who wants to explore knowledge and insight into cancer and its treatment without a particular deal of human interest himself. Full of wit and irony but also deeply poignant in a way that avoids mawkish sentimentality, this play is definitely a winner, and it is easy to see why it has won awards and hopefully delighted many audiences since it was first performed in 1999.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
This play consists of one more or less continuous scene that runs for about two hours without intermission, although there are clearly segments and flashbacks and the passage of time within the scene as we look at literature professor Vivian Bearing moving from a newly admitted patient with stage four metastatic ovary cancer and a family history of breast cancer to her dramatic death at the end of the play. In between we see Vivian dealing with the language of her doctors and nurses and communicating with them in the absence of loved ones who want to visit her, and coming to terms with her own passion for words and how they worked and the poetry of John Donne, which is ranked as particularly difficult to understand. As Vivian reflects on the way that her love of words has given her a good reputation as an academic but has cut her off from intimacy with other people, the audience is invited to reflect upon themselves and upon their own possible mortality as well, if they are so inclined.
While I have been critical of many of the contemporary writings I have read in terms of their politics and worldview, this play is a firm example of a play that I can relate to on multiple levels. For one, like the playwright and Vivian, I am deeply interested in complex and layered communication and the use of writing for the playing of communication games. For another, like Vivian and possibly John Donne (it is hard to know), I have often used my obvious facility with words and my ferocious wit as a way of making it difficult to get to know me, by making me somewhat unapproachable, a problem we definitely see with regards to Vivian as she endures eight courses of an aggressive monthly chemotherapy regimen only to put herself on no code to the eventual distress and embarrassment of the research doctor who wants to explore knowledge and insight into cancer and its treatment without a particular deal of human interest himself. Full of wit and irony but also deeply poignant in a way that avoids mawkish sentimentality, this play is definitely a winner, and it is easy to see why it has won awards and hopefully delighted many audiences since it was first performed in 1999.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
December 13, 2009
I saw the movie version (made for television, despite its absolute perfection) not long after I read the Edson's play. I've watched the movie version so many times, the actual play and movie have merged a bit in my memory.
There is no way to "spoil" the plot, given that we learn Vivian Bearing, a John Donne scholar of distinction, tells us she is dying at the outset. Bearing's entire life has been one of the mind. Her terminal cancer forces her to confront the mind/body split in a particularly compressed and poignant fashion. Repeatedly, she refers to herself in terms of her work - her mind - even when she is being subjected to tests or vomiting from the chemotherapy. Her slow movement toward attending to her body and reaching out to other human beings make for a compelling transformation. And, for lovers of John Donne, there are meaty allusions to his works, and you will never read his sonnet, "Death Be Not Proud," the same way again.
The movie - which has few variations from the play - is mesmerizing. Emma Thompson is luminous, human, intelligent, and drolly funny as Vivian Bearing, and while the movie/play is strangely uplifting, I cry - predictably - every time I watch it. Both the play and movie are among my favorites.
There is no way to "spoil" the plot, given that we learn Vivian Bearing, a John Donne scholar of distinction, tells us she is dying at the outset. Bearing's entire life has been one of the mind. Her terminal cancer forces her to confront the mind/body split in a particularly compressed and poignant fashion. Repeatedly, she refers to herself in terms of her work - her mind - even when she is being subjected to tests or vomiting from the chemotherapy. Her slow movement toward attending to her body and reaching out to other human beings make for a compelling transformation. And, for lovers of John Donne, there are meaty allusions to his works, and you will never read his sonnet, "Death Be Not Proud," the same way again.
The movie - which has few variations from the play - is mesmerizing. Emma Thompson is luminous, human, intelligent, and drolly funny as Vivian Bearing, and while the movie/play is strangely uplifting, I cry - predictably - every time I watch it. Both the play and movie are among my favorites.
June 6, 2016
Okay, so we did Vanya & Sonia & Masha & Spike at my community theatre a month ago. One of my dearest friends played Cassandra, the crazy/awesome/psychic housekeeper, and halfway through the run the co-props designer brings up Wit. I'd never heard of it but he told me all about how it's basically carried by one actor, the lead woman, whose character is a cancer patient. There are other characters in and out, but she never leaves the stage (no intermission) and has probably 90% of the lines. Apparently they had performed Wit at the theatre in the '90s (first thought: GODDAMMIT I MISSED IT) and Jo (Cassandra) had played Vivian. I was absolutely floored when I found out she'd actually shaved her head for the part, and promised myself I would look it up and read it.
Cut to today: I've had it out from the library for two weeks with absolutely no time to pick it up until now. If I thought I was floored just hearing about this play, that's nothing to what reading it was like. And of course I pictured my beautiful, brilliant Jo with these words coming out of her mouth and was just stunned by the experience of imagining it. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish we recorded our performances. I would give anything to have seen it. As it is, the play itself was astounding.
Cut to today: I've had it out from the library for two weeks with absolutely no time to pick it up until now. If I thought I was floored just hearing about this play, that's nothing to what reading it was like. And of course I pictured my beautiful, brilliant Jo with these words coming out of her mouth and was just stunned by the experience of imagining it. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish we recorded our performances. I would give anything to have seen it. As it is, the play itself was astounding.
February 9, 2014
This play hit close to home. My mother went through the process and experience that Vivian so humanely describes for us in this play.
This play is about victory. And kindness, compassion.
Margaret Edson nailed the journey of a just-diagnosed, relatively healthy-feeling patient to death.
She showed how impersonal the medical system can be but that there are those within the system that remember that the patient harbors fears and insecurities and discomforts; these people try to ease the journey by showing kindness.
She also shows the mental journey of the patient as they come to grips with their inevitable end, as they think about the meaning of their lives and the acceptance of what happens.
It's brilliant. Very well done.
The play is really about showing kindness to our fellow human beings in every situation since we don't really know their true positions at any moment in their lives.
There's victory in this play; in the way Vivian faces her treatment, her fears, her thoughts and how she ends her journey.
This play may have hit close to home but in a good way. It illuminates not the disease but the patients and all their grace, humanity and their strength.
This play is about victory. And kindness, compassion.
Margaret Edson nailed the journey of a just-diagnosed, relatively healthy-feeling patient to death.
She showed how impersonal the medical system can be but that there are those within the system that remember that the patient harbors fears and insecurities and discomforts; these people try to ease the journey by showing kindness.
She also shows the mental journey of the patient as they come to grips with their inevitable end, as they think about the meaning of their lives and the acceptance of what happens.
It's brilliant. Very well done.
The play is really about showing kindness to our fellow human beings in every situation since we don't really know their true positions at any moment in their lives.
There's victory in this play; in the way Vivian faces her treatment, her fears, her thoughts and how she ends her journey.
This play may have hit close to home but in a good way. It illuminates not the disease but the patients and all their grace, humanity and their strength.
April 20, 2019
The best thing I've read this year. I hesitate to try to say what it's about. Death, cancer, John Donne, salvation, grace, humility, humanity, growth, knowledge. I ugly cried. I recommend this book to all the women I know. Not because it's about a woman with cancer but because all of my lady friends will get something out of it.
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