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Wit: A Play, by Margaret Edson
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Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 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.
- Sales Rank: #7188 in Books
- Color: Grey
- Brand: Brand: Faber Faber
- Published on: 1999-03-29
- Released on: 1999-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.79" h x .34" w x 5.02" l, .24 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 85 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
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
Review
“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.
Most helpful customer reviews
62 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
The most powerful play I've seen/read in years
By Frank Cunat
I bought and read the play after seeing it performed twice by Judith Light, once off-Broadway and once regionally in Washington, D.C. I believe one would find the play equally powerful without having seen it. Perhaps because Margaret Edson never had formal training as a playwright, no one told her what she "shouldn't" do, and as a result, Wit is a brilliant, searing, *unique* vision of how a woman's mind becomes sharper and more insightful even as her body deteriorates. The character of Dr. Vivian Bearing reminded me a lot of Maria Callas in "Master Class" (at least, as rendered on stage); both are strong, imperious characters who draw you into their confidence while challenging you to keep up. And it's a relief to find a play that doesn't talk down to its readers/viewers, and actually contains, for instance, a lecture on a Donne sonnet -- which, incredibly, moves the action forward. After reading or seeing the play, you feel emotionally drained but energized.
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.
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
What Not To Do and Why To Do It Anyway
By Kevin L. Nenstiel
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.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Great play
By A Customer
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.
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